


The Clinic

by shewasagaystripper



Category: Queen (Band)
Genre: Angst, Anorexia, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Anxiety, Attempt at suicide, BPD, Backstory, Borderline, Bullying, Cold Turkey, Cutting, Depression, Diagnosis, Domestic Violence, Eating Disorder, Escapism, First Kiss, Formation of Band, Group Therapy, Heroin, Homophobia, M/M, Major Depressive Disorder, Mental Health Issues, Mental Illness, Mental Institution, Music Paying, Nightmares, Period Typical Homophobia, Pining, Psyciatry, Secrets, Self Harm, Slow Burn, Substance Abuse, Suicide, Swearing, The Clinic - Freeform, Therapy, These tags are all over the place I'm sorry, This doesn't sound too happy but I'll make it up with you!!, Troubled family history, Violence, blood mentioning, relationship: established, relationship: get together
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2019-08-04 00:54:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 277,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16336667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewasagaystripper/pseuds/shewasagaystripper
Summary: Brian is sent off to Queen Mary’s Psychiatric Hospital to cure his depression and borderline. His roommates, John in particular, help him push through this difficult time in his life





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Hello dear people, it’s been quite a while since I’ve uploaded something, which was all because I have been working on this new series called The Clinic which is like my masterwork so far. It will have fifteen parts and an epilogue, most of which have already been written down and the last part of which I’m currently working on. I will upload one chapter each week, which will be available both here on Tumblr, on my Wattpad account, and my A03 account (which I literally only created like the other week hfhsfhshfs).  
> Notes and warnings: These series feature, as you might have been able to read from the description, serious topics such as mental health issues, depression, and life in a psychiatric hospital. Mentions of illnesses, disorders, violence, etc. will take place throughout the story, but whenever something especially ‘shocking’ happens, I will mention this in the notes and warnings before the chapter.  
> Disclaimer: I wrote these series partly to come to terms with my own diagnosis, which is a major depressive disorder, and certain traits from a borderline disorder (the jury’s still out on that, as to say so). I therefore believe that I can safely say that I am familiar with depression and to an extent with borderline, but the symptoms of depression and borderline differ between its sufferers, so I am not saying that the way I experienced it (which I largely translated into the character of Brian) is an universal experience. I have no personal experience with other illnesses/problems I mention, such as anorexia or substance abuse, so everything I write about it in this story, is what I’ve learned about it at school or on the internet and in books. If anything is incorrect, you are welcome to correct me!  
> Have fun reading this, darlings, and please let me know what you thought of it! c:

‘Can we have your suitcase, please?’

Brian knew this moment was going to take place sooner or later. He already had been dreading it while signing the required paperwork and listening to the speech of the strict looking secretary concerning what would happen if he was to break one of the many rules and conditions that made up the sixteen pages long handout he had been given. And now that the administrative part of his admission had been taken care of and the two wardens had been searching his pockets for drugs or weapons and the like, there was nothing left to do for the men in uniform to check his suitcase for items to confiscate on the grounds of them being inappropriate, dangerous, or not allowed to go through those heavily secured doors and into the clinic for whatever other reason.

‘Come on, Brian. Give them your suitcase,’ his father’s voice suddenly popped up from behind him when Brian did not show any sign of going to obey to this question anywhere soon. Had it not been for the man speaking up now, Brian was positive he might have forgotten about his parents’ presence in the room; they had been quiet nearly all the way through this procedure, only nodding and saying ‘yes’ and ‘amen’ with everything the secretary sitting at the desk in the lobby of Queen Mary’s Psychiatric Clinic was telling them. While Brian found himself wanting to run straight out of the building with every new rule or regulation the woman mentioned, his parents seemed to be all too happy to agree to all the terms and conditions of their son’s stay here. It would have looked like they were glad to be rid of him, if Brian hadn’t been aware that they had called sending him away one of the hardest decisions of their lives.

With visible reluctance, Brian handed the suitcase over to the man standing next to him, who thanked him politely before putting it down on the and opening the clasps. There was not much inside of it; some clothes, some sanitary products like his toothbrush and shaving razor (which was soon confiscated on the grounds of being too dangerous, leaving Brian with the question how the hell he was going to make himself look decent without the help of a regular shaving razor). On top of this the suitcase contained a few books, some paper, and his pencil case, of out which they removed a pair of scissors and adhesive tape for the same reason as the one they had used to take his shaving razor away from him. There had not been much more he had been taken with him than these few products; he didn’t need much, and the only thing he really did want to take with him, his guitar, had been rejected beforehand on the ground that this would cause ‘too much disturbance for sensitive clients’ - and, once again, the supposed threat to safety the instrument could form. The first reason Brian had found somewhat reasonable - with God knew how many mentally ill people staying in here, it could turn out a chaos if everyone would randomly start playing instruments - but the second reason seemed nonsensical to him. What did they think he was going to do with his guitar? Hit someone over the head with it? Poke it through the window and escape through the hole? Cut off the guitar strings and strangle himself with it? How could he possibly even do this, now that they had taken his scissors away?

Still, even though there hardly was anything in the suitcase, let alone something he should feel ashamed about bringing into this place, the reluctance and uncomfortable feelings remained when Brian saw the two wardens going through the contents of his case. He had always appreciated his privacy and right not to have other people interfere with his personal businesses and belongings, but today, there was more that only this that added up to him not wanting other people to look through his property. It was as if the suitcase contained the last thing he owned at this point in time. Everything else had been taken away from him on the grounds of the safety of himself and others; his home, his education, his contact with the rest of the world… The items in the suitcase before him were the last things he had immediate access to, and to have other people rush through them and decide for him that he was not even allowed to bring this handful of items into the place he was going to spend quite a while at, stung Brian pretty badly.

‘All seems to be in order, miss,’ one of the wardens eventually said when he and his co-worker had neatly folded up all the garments and rearranged the rest of Brian’s books and things into the suitcase, which at last allowed Brian to breathe again.

‘Great,’ the secretary said, closing the clasps of the suitcase and giving Brian a sign that he could pick up his case again. Brian did not need to be told twice; he was quick to reach over, grab the suitcase away from the desk, and put it down next to him on the floor and as far away from the people who had confiscated it a few minutes ago to search through it. Luckily for him, these people - whose strict expressions had been making him nervous for a while now - were finally being send out of sight again by the woman.

‘Thank you, Dave. You two can return to your posts,’ she said, and the two men gave a short nod before wandering off to their places at either side of the main entrance of the building again, where they had to prevent people from walking in and out of the place without permission. After only having been inside the building for some thirty minutes - and that was only in the lobby - Brian was already positive that these two guards probably had a lot more difficulty keeping everyone who was inside of this miserable place in it, than preventing people from outside of it from entering.

‘Well, I’ve showed you the terms and conditions of your stay, we’ve signed the paperwork, your clothes and suitcase have been searched through…’ the woman behind the desk summed up. ‘All we need to do now is for you to just sign this last document and then your admission will be official.’ She reached into one of the drawers of her dark wooden desk to pull out yet another official looking form, which she laid down on the bureau top with the letters facing Brian’s direction.

‘What does it say?’ Brian frowned while his eyes quickly scanned over the document and found a sentence containing the words ‘restraint to institution until further notice’. It did not sound very positive being stated this way, but it turned out that his first impression of it was not nearly as negative as the contract itself was towards what he considered to be his basic human rights.

‘The main thing is that by signing this contract, you agree that you will be staying here until the people in charge of your curing process are unanimously convinced that you are ready to return to society again,’ the secretary told him in the calmest voice Brian had ever heard, as if detaining people inside this mental prison was the most normal thing in the world and absolutely could not be disapproved of or seen as inhumane by any sensible person.

‘ _What?_ ’ he asked with an look on his face that must have expressed some of the disbelief and shock he was currently experiencing after having heard the truth of what he was about to sign up for. Unfortunately for Brian, though, he seemed to be the only one to feel this way about the measure.

‘Just sign for it, son,’ he heard the voice of his father encouraging him to go along with what the contract stated, and Brian turned around to look at his parents to see if they were serious about this. The grave expression on their faces immediately told him that they seemed to agree with these conditions - perhaps even gladly agreed with them - and he had a hard time not saying something he was going to regret towards either his parents or the woman at the register.

‘No! I won’t let them hold me prisoner here!’ was what he eventually made out of it; his anger and disbelief was audible in his voice, but at least he had not insulted anyone, which was all Brian could wish for in a situation like this. It was not that he personally cared about not insulting somebody at this exact moment, but if he was to stay here for an indefinite period of time - which certainly was going to happen now that others were going to decide whether he was ‘cured’ enough to return to society or if he was to rot away at this place for an even longer period in time - it was probably better to keep his calm. He might have been on the verge of losing his temper and his control over his emotions, but he was not going to lose his understanding of how action and reaction normally worked. The thought of not ruining his reputation at this place already was all that prevented him from simply smacking someone across the face like he would have loved to do right now - especially when his mother talked to him as if nothing was going on and as if signing up to be detained until others decided he could be free again was indeed the most normal thing in the world to agree to.

‘They won’t, darling,’ she told him in that soft and soothing voice that only she could pull off, but which at the moment did not comfort Brian like it usually would have done - to be honest, Brian didn’t think anything or anyone could comfort him as long as he was going to be pressured into signing a contract that made him give up the remainders of his freedom.

‘It does bloody look like it!’ Brian sneered at her with the thought of what she was trying to push him into floating around in his mind like a catchy but annoying song he could not get rid of.

‘Mister May… Or Brian, can I call you that?’

A new voice joined in on the conversation; a new voice coming from a person who had been with them in the lobby since the moment they arrived, but who had not said more than a few words so far. There seemed to be a change on the way for this quiet and reserved attitude that Nolan, the psychiatric nurse who at the same time was fulfilling the role of being a mentor to a handful of people that happened to include Brian, now that the man was speaking up for what Brian was pretty sure was going to be the first time.

When Brian nodded somewhat reluctantly to the question if he could call him by his first name - not because he preferred being in last name basis with this nurse that did not seem to be much older than he was, maybe twenty-six or so at the very max, but because he would have preferred not to have _anyone_ talking to him right now. He wanted to be left alone by everyone currently surrounding him, but apart from the fact that his parents were going to be leaving him behind here anytime soon now, he was afraid he was not going to get rid of the nurses and mentors and guards anywhere soon.

‘Brian, I can assure you they won’t hold you prisoner here, or even detain you against your will. This regulation is not here to work against you, but purely to protect you from yourself,’ Nolan told him in a voice that was way stronger and way more convincing than Brian had ever thought the rather shy appearing nurse could have managed to pull off. It was just a shame that Brian could not get himself to believe a word of the things Nolan was stating as if they were some kind of holy truths that this entire mental institution was based upon and which they therefore esteemed highly as part of their programmes. The promise that he wouldn’t be detained here against his will simply conflicted the paragraph in the contract lying before him (which he by now had read completely and which indeed stayed that ‘appointed professionals’ were going to decide about when he was ready to leave the place again) too much for Brian to believe it.

‘Protect me from myself…’ Brian repeated in a mumble. It was a sentence he had heard endlessly over the course of the last year; he had been forced to start seeing a therapist first, then a doctor, eventually a psychiatrist… he had been forced to start taking medication against what the mental health experts called ‘deviant and obsessive thoughts’, to quit school, be monitored by either his parents or his doctors or his psychiatrist day and night… and all of that to ‘protect him from himself’,  a concept that no one had even ever really explained to him. It was as if they all used it as an easy excuse to make him do things he didn’t want to do without having to go deeply into why it was so important for him to obey their orders. As if Brian would immediately respect decisions and view them as being good for him if people told him they were ‘to protect him from himself’. This strategy had never worked on him so far, though, and he was sure this time it was not going to convince him either - even though Nolan did try to explain what exactly he had meant by telling him signing the contract was going to keep him safe from himself.

‘You know, you might find yourself wanting to leave sometimes as a result of feeling down for a while,’ Nolan started off. ‘By signing this contract, you protect yourself from these impulses that can have big consequences, such as signing yourself out on the fly without fully realising what you’re doing. You are, after all, more prone to…’ he thought for a moment, as if he needed the right words in order not to upset Brian, and eventually chose to finish his sentence with the words: ‘mood swings and being overemotional, which negatively affects your ability to judge a situation correctly.’

Once he had finished his sentence, the nurse and patient mentor did not so much look at the person he had been trying to convince of the importance of signing the contract, but he instead turned to the secretary. It was as if he looked for confirmation or approval towards his explanation in her, and if that was indeed what he had been needing, he got exactly what he had been searching for.

‘That’s very well said, Nolan,’ the older woman said to both the nurse and the rest of her audience, before turning to Brian again. ‘As you can hear, this regulation is not one to worry about, Brian. In fact, your psychiatrist and parents have already signed for it,’ she told him. Brian had no idea if she was hoping that hearing this was going to make him feel more comfortable about putting his signature underneath the contract; because if this had been her aim, Brian was afraid he was going to have to disappoint her. Hearing that his psychiatrist had signed for this nonsense was one thing, but being told his own _parents_ had agreed to have him be locked into this place was something else.

‘You signed for this?!’ Brian spat out once he had spun around to face his parents. He had expected them to at least take a step back - literally, that was - at the sight of his snapping, but they didn’t even blink when he looked at him as if they had just sold his soul to the devil himself.

‘It’s for your own good,’ his mother told him somewhat apologetically but mainly determinedly, as if she truly believed that signing a paper saying he would have to stay here until others told him he was allowed to leave, was exactly what was good for her son. It left Brian star struck for a moment; he had no idea how to react to his parents now that they seemed to be fully supportive of the idea of taking his right to self-determination away from him with a single signature on a contract, and that without even _telling_ him. If it hadn’t been for the secretary (and for himself for causing a scene about this contract in the first place), he was likely not to have found out about his parents’ secret cooperation to these evil plans until much later - until it would have been too late for him to back out of this place yet. This turned out to be a thought that got him even more riled up about his parents’ secret interference with his stay at this mental institution even more.

‘Why did they even need your signature on this? I’m twenty-four, you’re not responsible for me anymore! You don’t own me anymore!’ Brian said, and he hoped it would _hurt_. He knew his parents had always been used to deciding everything for him as their only (and more than just a little sheltered) child, which they all knew was one of the main reasons he had developed the mental disorders that were currently forcing him to leave home and go elsewhere for psychiatric care. Whether he actually succeeded in his aim of hurting them, was something Brian was afraid he was never going to find out; before his parents could find the time to think and react to what he had said to them, the secretary had already taken the lead of the conversation.

‘In your current position, they are responsible for you,’ the woman told Brian as if she was correcting a three year old repeating a song they had heard on the radio incorrectly. ‘By signing this paper, your parents have agreed to be the ones to look after you once you’ll be dismissed. That’s also why you can’t leave without their permission, because then they’d have to take care for you in a stage where they might not yet be able to correctly handle your psychiatric problems.’

 _They’ve dealt with me for long enough to know exactly how to deal with my problems_ , Brian wanted to shoot back at this miss know-all. But then he remembered that his parents had been the ones to insist on sending him off to this place, which to him seemed like a sign they did not know how to handle his problems, and he therefore decided not to bring up this argument.

‘You know what? _Fine_. Good for them that they signed it, but I won’t,’ Brian said as he pushed the paper and pen away from his side of the desk. The woman at the other side of it caught the pen between her fingers and gave him a look that was not so much angry or cold; it was completely neutral, which made Brian actually feel even worse and more pressured. After having been treated by psychiatrists for months at least, he knew that that look meant; it meant that they knew they would end up winning the situation no matter how much he disagreed with them and refused to do as they told him, because at the end of the day, they held the key to his mental survival, and they would only unlock him if he would do exactly as they told him. If he was not going to do as they said, they were simply going to refuse him the treatment even he knew he was badly in need of. It was cruel, it was inhumane, possibly even illegal, but after having been in the mental health branch for a while now, Brian knew that this was how things worked here - and the secretary’s reaction to his refusal to cooperate confirmed this perfectly.

‘We can’t help you if you don’t sign this contract. You have to put your trust in us,’ she told him just as neutral a voice and expression as the one she had been using all along, making Brian feel as if he was speaking to the leg of a chair; both expressed about the same amount of human emotions.

‘And give up my legal capacity to make my own decisions?’ Brian asked rhetorically.

‘Mister May,’ the woman continued ever so calmly, ‘I hope you do realise that with your mental condition at the moment, it’s better for you to leave making decisions to someone else-’

‘Mental condition? I have borderline, not insanity!’ Brian interrupted her mid-sentence, no longer able to oppress his anger towards eternally being treated as if he was crazy, irresponsible, incapable of thinking and acting according to reasonable thinking patterns that they seemed to be afraid he’d lost once his mental disorder started taking control of him. He had not even been diagnosed properly and people already had their stigmas and prejudices against him ready for usage, even though Brian was sure most of the people - even in a place like this, where mental disorders were an everyday topic during lunch hour - had no idea what exactly he was suffering from.

‘No one is telling you you are insane, Brian,’ the secretary said calmly in yet another attempt to reassure him of which Brian was sure she was going to fail at if she was going to continue her speech with the word ‘but’ or ‘however’ or anything the like, which indeed she did. ‘But as you know, your diagnosis was so new that your case and that of three of your fellow borderline sufferers was literally covered in the Psychologist Magazine as a ground-breaking research of mental illnesses, which is saying a _lot_ ,’ the secretary said, and Brian felt a wave of anger and hurt washing over him; the feeling of having been betrayed, perhaps even. He had never wanted his case, his thoughts, and his problems to be published in broad daylight, and he had made this very clear right from the start when he had been appointed to this psychiatrist who claimed to be onto something huge with a new diagnosis he was developing and which he thought Brian fitted right into. But apparently patient confidentiality laws only applied to people with ‘registered’ disorders, and not to those whose problems could make for an interesting article in a magazine that could make the breakthrough of a psychiatrist in the world of other mental health experts.

‘And what’s your point?’ Brian asked - he realised that another time another place this question might have been regarded as inappropriate or even rude, but he was rather sure that with his currently shaky voice and red-rimmed eyes, no one was going to recognise it as so, but as a simple question from someone who the people in here regarded as mentally instable.

‘My point is, we are not yet exactly sure how your mental disorder affects you and your capability of logical reasoning, and this is why we leave your parents and your psychologist to decide for you when you can leave this institution again,’ the woman told him calmly as ever, bringing this information to Brian as if it was an advantage to him that his parents had been appointed to decide over his fate - as if it was something for him to be grateful about instead of angry. ‘We will not held you prisoner here, and in consultation with your psychiatrist and your parents, you can always leave earlier than we planned for you to do.’

Brian squinted his eyes at her - both as to test her and because he hoped the tears that were starting to gather in his eyes weren’t going to show so much if he would partly close his eyes - only to end up with the soft-spoken conclusion that yet said it all: ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I can guarantee you that I’m speaking the truth. Nolan can confirm this. Right, Nolan?’ the secretary said as she turned to Brian’s mentor, who nodded heavily.

‘It’s true. We can always arrange something if you really feel like you have to get out of here,’ he said. Brian faced down when he heard this; he trusted Nolan better than the woman sitting in front of him for some reason. Maybe it was because Nolan was of the same age as he was, because he seemed just as shy and quiet as he was, or because he was not putting him under pressure as much as the woman. To Brian, the secretary seemed like the personification of the patronising, pedantic psychiatrists he had been needing to deal with for a while now, while Nolan presented the image of someone who seemed to be closer to Brian himself at the moment. Either way, his parents seemed to notice it, too, that he seemed more inclined to trust Nolan’s story than that of the secretary, because they immediately tried to use Brian’s cautious trust in Nolan to make him sign the contract and get over with the whole situation already.

‘Please just sign, Brian. You know how hard we fought to find you a place here,’ his mother nearly begged him, making Brian sign in defeat. He could never quite resist the pressure his mother was putting on him when she sounded like she was on the edge of tears by something he was pulling her through. He didn’t know if she was manipulating her or if it was just a voice in his head telling him this - a voice that was said to be part of his mental disorder - but what he did know, was that his mother was right about saying that they had been fighting hard to find him a place at a clinic. His psychiatrist had been wanting for him to be admitted into a mental hospital of some sort for a while, but none of them had any rooms left for a torn soul like him, and especially not when they heard that the condition he was suffering from was one they did not know a thing about. It had made him feel relieved whenever yet another attempt of his father being in touch with clinics failed to find a place for his son, because he didn’t _want_ to leave home now that it had become the only place in the world where he still felt safe to some extent. So while his psychiatrist’s telephone the evening before telling them that he had managed to find Brian a place at this certain Queen Mary’s Psychiatric Clinic had made both his parents overwhelmed with joy and relief, Brian had been doing nothing but crying and curling up to die. He could not believe they were actually doing this to him, tearing him out of what remained from his comfort zone and sending him off to this faraway place where he knew absolutely nothing and no one and just leave him alone to take care of himself while they knew so well he was simply not capable of looking himself at this point in his life.

But still, even though he had been trying to let his parents experience pain as revenge for what they were doing to him by refusing to sign this contract and telling them they didn’t own him anymore, he didn’t ever _really_ intend to hurt them, after all. He loved his parents and needed them more than anything in the world right now, which was why it hurt him even more that they were trying to get rid of him, as he viewed their attempt to leave him to the responsibility of the caretakers at this mental institution. He just wanted them to love him back, and the problem was that they did, but just not in the way he wanted them to love him. They could not see that he didn’t want professional help; he wanted to be loved by his parents, his family, his friends, and most of all, he wanted to be surrounded by them, something his parents were currently making impossible for him by sending him out to this hell place.

‘Come on, Brian,’ his father said as he stepped forwards, picked the pen up from the secretary’s hand, and put in between the fingers of his son. ‘Do it for us.’

With shaky hands, anger towards his father for guilt-tripping him into giving in and tears of frustration and pure terror of what people were going to do with him once he had handed his right to decide over his own fate over to them, Brian begrudgingly put his signature at the bottom of the paper, next to that of his psychiatrist, his father’s, and his mother’s. _Betrayers_ , he found himself thinking about mainly these last two people, and he could not shake off this thought, not even once he had put the pen down and watched as the secretary picked up the contract and safely stored it away in one of the filing cabinet behind her desk. She seemed to be in a hurry, probably to deter Brian from changing his mind on the fly and tearing the legal document into a thousand little pieces, ruining all the hard work they had put into making him sign it in the first place.

‘So then that’s settled. Thank you for your cooperation,’ she said, and although her voice did not necessarily sound sarcastic but actually relieved and grateful Brian was finally cooperating, Brian still did not trust her. ‘Now, is there anything you want to say to your parents before Nolan will show you around the place?’

‘Yes,’ Brian said while turning to the two people standing at the other side of the desk. ‘You’re making a _mistake_.’ The last word was not so much said as much as it was squeaked; he was choking on invisible tears and both he and his parents knew he was not going to be able to hold up his ‘strong’ composure for much longer - as far as he had managed to do this at all since the moment he had stepped through the doors of this hauntingly uninviting building.

‘Oh, Brian…’ His mother was the first to lose her previously strict composure at the sight of her son on the edge of tears; she gave Brian a compassionate look that only caused Brian to feel even worse about having to say goodbye to her for the time being, and he soon felt the first tears starting to sting his eyes, before they eventually started making their way down his cheeks. The sight of this, in turn, made his mother emit a somewhat pitiful sound that he had heard a few times before in his life, always at moments when she was on the verge of breaking down after hearing and seeing something that touched her deeply. Knowing that she felt this bad about having to leave him behind at least made Brian realise that she did care about him, which was at least something of a comfort to him and a defeat to the voice inside his mind telling him no one around him cared about him anymore now that he was slowly going out of his mind lately.

Still, even though he knew deep inside that his parents cared about him, he could not shake off the idea that they were sending him away to make things easier for themselves, because they didn’t want to deal with him anymore, because they wanted to hurt him for having hurt them with his mental disorder and the many symptoms and problems that were part of it, and it made him feel so terribly rejected, abandoned, wronged, and misunderstood, all of which were feelings he could no longer oppress now that he was facing his parents for what might be the last time in quite a while.

‘I don’t… I don’t want to be _alone_ ,’ Brian sniffed in a voice that sounded terribly small even to his own ears, which was the last thing his mother needed to drop her handbag into the hands of her husband, who was looking at his son with an equally painful expression on his face, and cling her arms around his torso to hold him tight. The feeling of his mother embracing him made Brian feel somewhat less alone, but the thought of not getting to experience this feeling anywhere soon again, made his sniffling change into actual sobbing within a time span of not more than five seconds.

‘How can you _do_ this to me?’ Brian said as he sobbed his heart out, something that seemed to draw his father over to his mother and him also; Harold first somewhat awkwardly placed the handbag his wife had given him against the wooden desk that was the central point of the lobby, before he moved over to place on hand around the shoulders of his wife, and the other against the small of Brian’s back. Just the thought of his father holding him made Brian even more emotional; his father had never been one for physical contact or even a lot of kind words and comfort, so having him stand close to him and try to soothe him by comfortingly rubbing along the small of his back, really meant a lot to Brian - and it remembered him once again of how he didn’t want to say goodbye to both him and his mother.

‘We’re doing what’s right for you, darling, believe me,’ his mother said when Brian’s sobbing had subsided enough for her to at least make herself audible again, but Brian could hear in her voice that she did not seem as confident about this belief as she had been before; it sounded somewhat like she had to convince herself of that this really was the best move for them to make.

‘It’s going to be hard right now, but one day you’ll be thankful we sent you here,’ his father joined his wife’s attempt to cheer him up - or at least to make sure Brian would lot cling onto their legs and refuse to let them leave the building without taking him home with them. Unfortunately for his father, however, Brian highly doubted that he was ever going to be grateful that his parents had brought him over to this place; the contracts he had been needing to sign, the rules and regulations he had been told about so far had been making him very uncomfortable, and the atmosphere that was hanging around this huge grey brick building in what seemed to have been the middle of the country while driving up to it, was not exactly adding up to Brian’s overall impression of the place he was going to have to stay at. And that was only the outside; so far he hadn’t seen anything besides the prison-like outside walls of the building and its uniform looking lobby, and he already felt like he was never going to feel comfortable here, let alone that he would feel glad he had been going here.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Brian said once again with an audible sob in his voice, tearing away from his parents’ grip slightly to let his eyes dart through the greyish lobby. It looked sad, disheartening, and most of all, it looked like a prison of some sort. The only decoration he could detect so far was a; perhaps because mental health institutions like these were always on a tight budget since the national health service still did not seemed to be convinced in the year of 1971 that a mental disorder could affect your life just as seriously as any ‘visible’ illness and therefore didn’t spend nearly as much money on mental healthcare than on physical healthcare. Or maybe the staff in here was afraid that anything other than a concrete planter box probably secured to the floor beneath to make sure no one could throw it over or the like would be endangering for the patients in here. This latter thought did not exactly brighten up the picture Brian had in mind of what kind of people were being treated in this place. He had been told everyone in here suffered from one or multiple mental disorders that required psychiatric care but which did not need 24 hour surveillance for the safety of themselves and the ones around them, but if they apparently could not be allowed to handle a roll of adhesive tape or decoration of some sort in the main lobby of the building, Brian was seriously afraid he was going to be locked away with… well, a bunch of lunatics, if he was allowed to call them that.

‘I won’t ever be thankful you sent me here,’ Brian continued tearfully. ‘I don’t want to-’

‘It’ll be alright. You’ll just need some time to adjust to the new situation, like with all new things in life,’ his father told him, leaving Brian to wonder where he found the calm he used to speak with while both his wife and his son were tearing up. Surely, Brian could hear the emotion in his dad’s voice, but he was not quite sure if he was breaking through to his father about just how much he didn’t want to stay here.

‘I don’t _want_ to adjust to the new situation,’ Brian protested, hearing how he sounded like a whiny toddler not getting his way when he said this, but not managing to care enough to change his tone. ‘I don’t want to be here!’

‘Hush, Brian,’ his mother told him as she carefully tore apart from him and give him a rub over his cheek, only adding up to Brian’s feeling of being a whiny toddler. ‘Soon enough you’ll feel like you’ll belong here just as much as the other people in here do.’

‘I won’t,’ Brian protested, ‘I won’t and you know it,’ he said, and he saw in the still teary eyes of his mother that she knew what he meant. He had never been one to easily be in touch with strangers, and even if he was, he found it hard to connect with them on a level that went deeper than simply acquaintances or classmates or the like and move on to being friends instead. Sure, he had some friends - but then again, he had neglected most of his friendships over the course of the last year, when the depression (that was most likely to have been caused by his borderline disorder) was starting to weigh him down to the level were talking to his parents sometimes had already been too much for him to deal with, let alone be in touch with people outside the house. In short, he had never been   star at making friends or even being out there among other people, and doing this was even harder with his current mental problems restricting him from ‘normal’ communication, which in turn made Brian fear the time he was going to spend at this mental clinic was going to a lonely one.

Brian was not sure if his mother was avoiding the topic of him not going to be likely to be in touch with others a lot while staying at this place when she didn’t mention ‘friendships’ or ‘human contact’ anymore and continued their conversation by saying: ‘Brian, I’m sure you’ll soon feel fine, and then you’ll be just as proud of yourself for going here as we currently are of you.’

 _I can hardly see how you can be proud of me for going here when it’s not so much about ‘me going’ but about ‘my entire environment literally locking me away into this place’,_   Brian dimly thought to himself while wiping away another line of tears beneath his eyes. He knew for a fact that he was _not_ going to be fine at this place, that he was _not_ going to be proud of himself for going here, but he seemed to be unable to convince his parents of this. They just didn’t seem to grasp the idea of his brains not currently working like theirs did; as long as he was dealing with his borderline and the depression it had induced, he was unable of feeling comfortable, emotionally stable, or proud of himself, no matter what would happen.

‘You’re stronger than you think, Brian. We hope this place will teach you that,’ his mother said as she gave Brian’s pale cheek a bit of a pinch that made Brian feel like he was four years old again, when his mother would do this to him to step up and go to school during those first few weeks he had been afraid of the other children in his kindergarten class. To be completely honest, right now he felt similar to how his four year old self must have been feeling at the time: abandoned and sent away by his parents to a place where he was going to be all alone in a multitude of people who he didn’t know, didn’t _want_ to know, and most of all, where he was going to be submitted to the authority of others who were going to decide what he could and could not do. The only difference was that the four year old version of himself begrudgingly and anxiously being sent off to school had the advantage of being allowed to go home at three in the afternoon, while the 24 year old version of himself currently standing at the port of a mental institution had no chances of going home, or even of getting to see his parents anywhere soon again.

‘I’ll miss you,’ Brian squeaked after a moment of silence, in which he realised he was done quarrelling with his parents about whether he was going to enjoy his stay at Queen Mary’s (as far as ‘enjoy’ was the right word to use in the current situation); he was done bickering over who had made him go here and for what reason and why they wouldn’t just let him stay at home. He knew him staying here was going to happen wither he protested against it or not; with his suitcase standing next to him, Nolan standing a few metres away from them to drag him behind the gates that separated the lobby from the real place, and the contracts he had been made to sign safely locked away and out of his reach, they had gotten to a point of no return. There was no use fighting with his parents now if he did not want to make himself feel even worse than he was doing already; Brian knew they shouldn’t say goodbye to each other on bad terms, no matter how abandoned and hurt and misunderstood he felt. He knew that feeling estranged from the only people he had managed to stay in touch with during the heights and depths of his depression, was only going to make him feel more like he was alone on this planet, which was not a feeling that was likely to be going to be a beneficial one to him if he was to stay at this hell for a while.

Leaving the quarrelling behind him, he turned to his mother with a soft and most of all vulnerable: ‘will you miss me too?’, forever needing to hear his parents’ confirmation that they loved him even after all of the endless days and sleepless nights they had lovingly helped him pull trough.

‘Honey… of course we’ll miss you, too. But we’ll… we’ll think about you every day,’ his mother promised him, but hearing this hurt Brian even more; he knew she wanted to promise him to either telephone or write every day, which he was sure she would have done if she could have, but she had to adjust this aim to ‘thinking about you’ instead. One of the main rules at Queen Mary’s - and also the only one that had made his mother unsure whether sending him here was really going to be a good idea - was that new patients were not allowed to be in contact with anyone outside of the building for the first while, including family, friends, partners, and whoever more they were usually in touch with. And although they had been formed that this ‘contact ban’ would usually gradually be replaced after a few weeks, when patients had recovered enough to slowly be allowed to be back in touch with the outside world again, Brian’s psychiatrist had left a special note to the staff saying that it was probably better for his recovery not to be in touch with anyone during his entire stay at the mental hospital. Whether this really would be beneficial for his mental health or if his psychiatrist was simply using the excuse to use Brian as his main subject in yet another experiment that could mean his breakthrough in the world of psychiatry, was something Brian didn’t know. All he did know was that he was glad he would be appointed a new psychiatrist in this place. Maybe that was going to be at least one perk of being in here; not being in touch with outsiders also meant he wasn’t going to be in touch with his old psychiatrist who he wished not to ever see again. But then he remembered that the man was one of the people who got to decide whether he was going to be allowed to leave this place or not, which made a new stream of tears well up behind his eyes.

‘You’ll always be on our minds, you’ll never have to worry about that,’ his father - of course not realising Brian was worrying about a completely different topic already by now - in an attempt to join in on what his wife was saying. ‘We’ll think about you night and day, and we’ll be ready for you to return home as soon as you are.’

Brian, not wanting to question his parents any longer, knowing that he would only drag himself down if he questioned their promises any longer, simply asked for one more confirmation that they did really still love him, even though he had been breaking them up mentally for way too long.

‘Promise?’

‘We promise,’ his parents said in unison, before his mother was the first one to stand on her tiptoes (it were moments like these that reminded Brian of how short either she was, or how tall he was himself) to plant a kiss on his still slightly teary cheek. ‘Go now, Brian. Let Nolan show you around the place. He’s been waiting on us for way too long already,’ she said with an apologetic glance in the direction of the nurse, who gave her a kind smile in return and said that they should take their time - after all, this was going to be the last moment they were going to see each other in quite a while.  

They took about a minute to give each other a few hugs, share some kisses - even his father kissed him on the cheek, which greatly surprised Brian - share some tears, kind words and the like, before Brian eventually pulled himself apart from the literal and metaphorical grip his parents had on him, picked the suitcase standing on the floor next to him, hardly daring to face them now that the point of no return truly was upon them. He did not know what to say to his parents right now; he had said everything he had been meaning to, and was afraid that anything he would say now was not going to be meaningful to any of them.

For this reason, he was glad that it was his mother who said the final words. ‘Keep strong, darling, Know that your father and me are very proud of you whatever happens,’ she said as she reached forwards and gave him one more encouraging pat on the shoulder, after which she withdrew herself again and grabbed onto the arm of her husband, as if to prevent herself from the tendency to reach over to him again and never ending the circle of saying their goodbyes. ‘And please, keep your mind open to new situation and new people. Don’t lock yourself away again,’ she whispered at him, obviously referring about how he had slowly lost touch with most of the people around him over the course of the last year simply by not leaving the house or even his bedroom anymore. Brian could hardly look at her as he nodded softly, especially because he knew that it was going to be a meaningless promise. If his borderline oriented brain and depressed heart were not willing to cooperate, there was nothing he could do to try and keep his head up.

‘Well then,’ the secretary eventually interfered, sounding relieved, like she had been waiting for the right moment she could finally get rid of these three people disturbing her probably normally more peaceful day job at the lobby of the institution. ‘Nolan, if you can take Brian with you and show him around the place according to the protocol, then I’ll show his parents out,’ she suggested, and her already standing up from behind her desk and pulling her pencil skirt down before walking over to the man and woman, made it pretty clear to Brian that she thought it was about time his visitors would leave and he himself would disappear behind the gates of the clinic.

‘Brian, are you coming with me?’ Nolan invited kindly after having picked up his medical file and the small box of his antidepressants that his psychiatrist had ordered Brian to take with him and hand over to the staff at Queen Mary’s to look after it for him. Brian, after having flashed his parents one more somewhat desperate glance that told him exactly how he felt about being left behind here and having to follow this guy into the place, picked up his suitcase and took a few hesitant steps towards his mentor. Nolan walked towards the gates that separated the lobby from whatever was behind those walls, asked the guard standing next to it to open the door. Brian felt himself shivering when the heavy iron doors opened before him to reveal a long and just as uninviting looking hallway that he dreaded to step into.

Probably feeling Brian’s hesitance towards stepping over the threshold and letting himself be locked up behind the iron doors, Nolan placed a hand on the small of his back, reminding Brian of what his father had been doing to comfort him a few minutes ago, and it made him feel homesick to his parents’ love and presence already. He turned around one more time to catch a glimpse of his parents, seeing how his father had thrown his arms around his mother while they looked back at him as if letting go of him was indeed the hardest decision they had ever made. Brian swallowed painfully and tried - but failed - to give them a smile, and instead left them behind with the image of a miserable look upon his face being the last one they had caught before he had turned around and stepped over the threshold, involuntarily letting the irons doors that closed up behind him lock him inside the mental clinic for an indefinite period in time, until someone would free him from the prison they were putting him into.

But given that the people who would have to decide about his release were the exact same ones that had decided to send him to this greyish hell in the first place, Brian feared that it was going to be quite a while before he was going to be allowed to return to society again.

 _If he ever was going to be allowed to return to society again,_ Brian realised dimly, letting his head hang while the iron doors closing behind him made him realise that there was really, really no way back anymore, not now, not in the near future, and maybe never at all _._


	2. Part Two

Brian felt the impact of the heavy iron doors closing behind him thunder through his bones, which made a shiver run down his spine. It was cold in the main hallway, a broad walkthrough with grey walls and colour-matching doors at either side - doors with numbers and names on them which he also could not quite catch at the speed of which Nolan was walking past them. Brian struggled to keep up with him while having to drag his suitcase with him, but luckily, Nolan seemed to become aware of this eventually and stood still in the middle of the hallway to help Brian catch up with him.

‘Thank you,’ Brian whispered in relief when Nolan gave him a moment to breathe.

‘Sorry, I’m kind of used to running around this place rather than walking. Part of the life of being a nurse, I guess,’ he said with an apologetic smile that made Brian feel a bit more comfortable. ‘And also, don’t worry about miss Meyer. The only time you’re going to be seeing her again is when you leave here,’ Nolan told him, obviously having caught how nervous the secretary had been making the new patient he had been assigned to show around. Brian flashed him a bit of a weak smile in return to acknowledge the witty remark he had made, but the comment mainly made him feel even more nervous than he already had been.

_You’re only going to be seeing her again when you leave._

_Whenever that may be._

_If you ever get leave._

It was a question Brian hadn’t been daring to ask before, but felt like he really needed an answer to at this exact moment, so he decided just to go for it. ‘Nolan? Do people stay here for… like forever?’ he asked with a bit of a squeak in his voice, and he hoped Nolan wouldn’t immediately think of him as weak or emotionally unstable - if he didn’t already after just having been present during the scene in the lobby a few minutes ago. Much to his surprise, however, Nolan reacted entirely calmly to this somewhat desperate question while putting a few steps into the direction of the other side of the hallway, indicating they were slowly continuing their walk again.

‘No, people don’t stay here forever,’ Nolan comforted him. ‘First of all, we’re a clinic specialised in helping young male adults who find themselves struggling with curable, or at least treatable, mental illnesses. We generally accept people between the ages of eighteen and thirty here, so people much older than that you won’t really find here.’

‘So where do they go?’ Brian found himself asking all of the sudden, even though he wished he hadn’t right after; not so much because he didn’t want to hear the answer to this question, but because it was so unlike him to be nosy and pry into things that were none of his business. After all, it was going to be a long time before he was going to be turning thirty. But then again, he could not hold back his curiosity; he felt like even though he had been made to sign countless contracts concerning his stay here and the rules and regulations he had to stick to, he still knew nothing about this place, its staff and clients, the way they operated on a day to day basis, and their treatment.

‘To Queen Anne’s, another location specialised in men between the ages of thirty and fifty years old,’ Nolan answered, before he returned to the first question Brian had asked him. ‘And then of course, we only treat treatable and curable illnesses both there and here. People that can be helped with psychiatry and medicines and who don’t require intense 24 hour surveillance. If people do need this, or if they need care for longer than eighteen months, maybe two years at max, they again will be transferred elsewhere so they won’t block the admission of new patients. Our goal is to treat people within six months, maybe one year; only severe cases stay longer.’ Brian looked at him, and Nolan did not even need to hear him ask what he meant with ‘elsewhere’; the look on his face alone was enough for him to understand that he would like an explanation of this rather vague direction. ‘Often when patients need around the clock care and surveillance or care for longer than two years, they go to a real mental hospital.’

‘And what’s the difference?’ Brian asked while subtly trying to catch a glimpse on the small signs on the doors they passed every so many metres. He had made out that most of them said ‘PRIVATE ROOM’, followed by a name below it, making him guess that these were the places where the staff either slept on their shifts, or the rooms for individual therapy or psychiatry. Whatever they were, they seemed to be mostly abandoned at this point in time; he heard some soft murmuring taking place behind some of the doors, but most of the rooms seemed to be empty, and not a single other person was to be detected in the hallways they were currently passing.

‘We are a psychiatric institution that focusses on therapy and medicines for recovery. Mental hospitals are state-controlled places where the staff have more authority, such as detaining someone for a lifetime, medical procedures, surgeries, electroshock therapy. I’ve even heard they still use lobotomy as a form of treatment to this day…’ Nolan summed up. Brian felt himself shivering to the core just at the thought of any of these activities being executed on him, and he was glad that his mentor seemed to feel the same way about it when he finished his talk with the sentence: ‘Nothing I wanted to be engaged in, anyway.’

The nurse abruptly stood still, making Brian follow his example of halting his pace. ‘This is where we’ll first have to be,’ he said while knocking on the door and immediately receiving a ‘come on in!’ from the whoever was at other side of the door. Brian managed to read the tin sign on the door just before Nolan enthusiastically swung it open; it said ‘ARCHIVE AND DOCUMENTATION’, and he assumed this was where they were going to be dropping off his medical records as they walked through the door.

‘Nolan, there you are! I had already been expecting you. I heard from Monica that you are to show our new patient around, and thus of course drop Mr. May’s records off.’

 _Well, everybody already seems to know who I am here before I’m even here,_ Brian thought to himself while following his guide into the small room. Behind the desk on the right side of it was an enthusiastic looking woman, somewhere in her thirties. She was surrounded by book cases and file cabinets in which Brian assumed they gathered medical records, behaviour reports, and whatever more data they kept track on in here. Brian wondered how many records they were going to be keeping on his behaviour, mental health, and God knew what more during his stay here, and if these details were going to pop up later in his life to haunt him wherever he went to live or look for a decent job. But once again, it seemed like Nolan sensed exactly what Brian was fearing for, and he was able to say something that matched what he needed to hear right now perfectly.

‘Brian, this is Gracie Miller, our archivist. She will watch over whatever your doctors, therapists, and psychiatrists write about you with her life,’ Nolan told him in full conviction, to which the woman nodded vehemently in agreement.

‘National Security would have to climb over my dead body before they could gain access to the papers I keep here,’ Gracie added to Nolan’s speech, a thought that both comforted and haunted Brian. On the one side, he was glad that this woman took patient confidentiality a lot more serious than his psychiatrist used to do. But on the other hand, the thought of her claiming people would have to murder her before they could see the documents made Brian fear for what was in them, and more than that, what was going on with the people at this place to apparently have things written down in their records that could not ever be brought into the daylight.

‘Here are the documents his previous psychiatrist gave us,’ Nolan interrupted Brian from his thoughts about what on earth was going on at this place as he handed his papers over to the woman who would them with her life from now off.

‘Great, let me see…’ Gracie said while quite literally diving into the details of Brian’s dossier, which made Brian blush and look away, especially when she started reading some details out loud. ‘Mister Brian Harold May, born July 19, 1947… Graduated from grammar school but dropped out of university last year… Diagnosed with depression and borderline this March…’ she said while flicking through the first few pages of his documents, before she closed the folder, much to Brian’s relief.

‘What do you suggest we store this under, Nolan?’ she then asked.

 _Well, under my name, perhaps,_ Brian mentally replied to this question that sounded rather obvious to him, but it turned out that these people were talking about other criteria.

‘The depression was caused by his borderline, so I’d suggest we take borderline. That makes it easier to look up his dossiers when we already have so many people under ‘depression’,’ Nolan said with a bit of a sad smile towards Brian, who awkwardly looked away.

‘Sounds good, but I’m afraid we don’t have a separate folder for borderline yet,’ Gracie said as she stood up and walked over to the other side of the room, where she looked at the different boxes in the filing cabinet with titles naming ‘common’ mental illnesses such as depression, manic depression, anxiety disorders, and the like - but, as far as Brian could see, indeed no borderline or anything related to it. It failed to surprise him, though; no one had ever heard of it apart from a few medical professionals, which was made painfully clear to him once again by the words of the archivist.

‘To be honest, I had never heard of it before myself. I had to look the word up in the latest DSM, but that didn’t even contain it yet, so I asked doctor Imholz if he knew,’ Gracie said. Her voice turned more intense, as if she was going to tell something terribly exciting - something that might have been terribly exciting to her as an outsider, but to Brian, just the word ‘terrible’ would do. ‘Now it turns out that he worked with this psychiatrist called L. J. Sumner, if I remember the name correctly, who literally introduced the term borderline and is still working on perfecting the diagnosis as we’re speaking. Isn’t that great?’ Gracie asked with a smile, but Brian felt his stomach turn at just the mentioning of that name - a feeling that only got worse when Nolan joined her excitement.

‘If you already think that’s cool, then wait until you hear this,’ Nolan said, making Brian hold his breath and inwardly plead for him not to say it, to please not continue his sentence, to please not say what he thought the nurse was going to say- ‘Brian knows professor Sumner personally. He used to be his psychiatrist.’

‘No way! Really?’ Gracie asked, displaying an excitement Brian could hardly understand. All he could do was nod a little awkwardly in reply to the woman who seemed to be very impressed by the news of him having been - or still being, to be exact - a patient of someone who apparently was going down in the history of psychiatry. He wished Nolan had never said a word about him having been treated by professor Sumner, but he could hardly blame him for bringing it up - how could the nurse have known that he _detested_ the man after having been treated like a lab rat by him?

‘That must have been so extraordinary, knowing you are part of the development of a completely new diagnosis, that you’re helping mental healthcare evolve by letting yourself being treated…’ Gracie continued her speech in a nearly dreamy voice, one that made it hard for Brian to oppress the tendency to settle down next to her and tell her exactly what this ‘amazing’ professor Sumner had done to him with his manipulative way of dragging information out of him for months, throwing his records around for his scientific articles without his permission, putting him on multiple antidepressants and antipsychotics at the same time just to see how he would react to it, and eventually discarding him to this mental institution as if he was a rag doll he could cast away whenever he was done playing with him.

But, given that Brian did not want to share any of these thoughts during a first meeting with an archivist, he simply settled with: ‘It sure was extraordinary. I’m just afraid that I prefer normality.’

‘I see, I see. I can totally understand that in your condition,’ Gracie said, and although it sounded compassionate, Brian felt as if it was yet another attack on his ability to handle people and situations while dealing with his mental disorders. ‘In that case you’ll be glad to hear that you’ll be assigned to doctor Gaskell, who is a great psychist, but at the same time also very calm and quite literally the epitome of normality. I’m sure her methods and treatment will fit you perfectly.’

‘That would be great,’ Brian said, and even though he still wasn’t so sure about what to think about Gracie’s way of thinking about him as what seemed to be someone who was unable to handle anything that was not part of his daily routine, he seriously meant it that he was happy to be given a psychiatrist that was described as ‘calm’ and ‘normal’. He would expect it to be like _heaven_ to finally see a psychiatrist he could actually speak to without having to wonder whether she was going to use her words against him, or worse than that, use them in her medical research and publish them for the entire world to read while all he wanted was some peace and quiet.

‘Have you been to the pharmacy and medicine distribution centre yet?’ Gracie asked as what seemed to be a sudden change of subject, but it turned out that it was all connected to the woman she had been mentioning a moment ago. ‘Because if not, I think you can find miss Gaskell there at this time. Maybe you can introduce him to her a bit, Nolan,’ Gracie proposed, and Nolan nodded.

‘Sure thing. We’ll be leaving now in that case, so we won’t miss out on her,’ he said, already moving towards the door, and Brian gladly followed him. He did not feel entirely comfortable around this woman that sure seemed to be enthusiastic about her job, but who made him feel like he was a sad, oversensitive piece of human - which he knew he was, surely, but he didn’t need others to rub it. He was perfectly capable of doing that himself.

Closing the door behind him, Brian followed Nolan further along the hallway, where the nurse stood still in front of a new, identical looking door after not too long a walk, and opened it to give the both of them access to the space behind it.

It had been sounding so interesting to Brian - the pharmacy and medicine distribution centre - but it turned out to be just another crisp white room with a single woman behind a desk - a service counter more like, perhaps. Behind her were no book cases but a huge open closet with countless little boxes, pigeonholes if you’d like, glass doors in front of each of them. All of the glass doors contained a sticker that seemed to contain a name and a medicine recipe, and behind the little see-through doors were medicine boxes, strips, bottles, or whatever form medication came in. In front of the service counter were rope barriers that Brian assumed were meant to make people queue up neatly for their daily dose of medicines. Right now they did not fulfil any function, as there were only two women present in the room; one of which was probably the pharmacist, and the woman standing at the other side of the desk Brian assumed must be the psychiatrist Gracie had spoken of.

He turned out to be right about this aspect; Nolan introduced him to the young woman, who, much to Brian’s relief, seemed kind, patient, and most of all, _normal_ , not as if she was going to give away and modify his medical records for the sake of publicity like his last psychiatrist did. He still remained hesitant - after the things he had been pulled through by his old medical experts, he found it hard to trust anyone in the medical world again - but he had a feeling that this woman was going to be a better help to him and his mental problems than the last man was. Then again, being better than professor Sumner was not that hard to achieve; Brian was willing to call anyone who didn’t mess around with his medical records and break his patient confidentiality rights better than his previous psychiatrist. In that respect, the bar was set rather low for this woman who was going to take over the tasks from the man he wished not to ever see again unless it was to tell him he was allowed to leave this place.

Miss Gaskell unfortunately couldn’t stay long - she had to get back to her office for a meeting with a patient that was to start at five o’clock - but she promised to be in touch with Brian about when he was to show up at her place for weekly, biweekly, triweekly, daily, or however often he was going to need her consultations. Brian feared that he was going to be pulling it more to the latter option once they would find out just how badly his issues were.

‘So, I’m assuming you also came here to drop off some medicines and show the new boy around?’ the pharmacist asked the two of them once miss Gaskell had moved out of the room, returning them to the topic of what they had actually come for.

‘Hi Donna, exactly. If I’m not mistaken, a box has been reserved for mister Brian May,’ Nolan said with a nod towards the person standing next to him, who flashed an insecure smile at the serious looking woman - serious, not overly stern like the secretary he had come across earlier that day - who was standing across from them.

‘Yes, that’s right. I’ve got a box left here at the very right,’ she said as she walked over to the other side of the pigeonhole closet and opened the small door to an empty box.

‘Perfect. Now, here is the sticker with the name, patient number, and daily medicine recipe,’ Nolan said as he handed the small piece of paper over to the woman at the other side of the counter. She got right to business, tore the sticker off the adhesive paper, and stuck in on the upper corner of the window to mark it as Brian’s. ‘And then here are his medicines. Gracie has already registered them, by the way.’

‘Great. I’ll order a new supply when necessary, but this must be enough to last him a few weeks,’ Donna said as she peered inside the small container of Seroxat Nolan had just given to her, before she closed the package and placed it behind the small glass window. It made Brian feel a little weird not to be able to have his medicines with him. Of course, he could understand that this institution probably needed regulations for medicine intake if they wanted to keep track on who was taking what and if they wanted to prevent people to either stop taking their meds or overdose on them, either accidentally or on purpose. Also, during the last few months, during which his borderline and depression had grown worse and dragged him down even more than they had ever done before, Brian’s parents had regulated his medicine for him. He was thus used to having other people look after his medicines for him, but still it felt weird; as if the people in here were taking away another piece of his responsibility, as if they did not trust him to handle procedures as easy as taking one pill each morning without screwing up, as if they were grasping every situation they could to make him feel small. As if it was all part of them trying to _break_ him in here.

‘Good, so I’ll explain how it works,’ Nolan said once the medication had been safely stored away from Brian’s reach. ‘Do you take your antidepressants in the morning or evening?’

‘Morning,’ Brian mumbled in reply, still staring at box 78 at the far right corner,  which was the one his medication had disappeared into.

‘In that case you go to this place each morning before breakfast, so between half past seven and eight, you go here and line up between these ropes,’ Nolan said, pointing at the rope barriers that created a place for people to queue up between, ‘and when you get to the desk, you show them your patient card. We’ll go and pick that up in a moment,’ Nolan told him when he realised Brian did not yet have this item in his possession yet. ‘You show it to whoever is behind the counter, and they’ll pick up the right amount of medicines for you, along with a cup of water. You have to take your medicines right here, where they can see it, so we’re sure you’re actually taking them. After this, they will sign your medication intake list and you’re free to go again. All clear?’

Brian nodded a bit absent-mindedly, still not full trusting these people to take care of his medication. Who knew what they could do to him? They could give him more, less, a much stronger type or even a completely different medicine - and there was nothing he would be able to do against it even if he did notice they were tampering with his meds.

‘Great. Then it’s time we move on,’ Nolan said as he said goodbye to the pharmacist and took Brian into the hallway again with the words: We’re going to the laundry room now to pick up your clothes.’

 _Clothes? Do we wear a uniform here?_ Brian thought to himself, but immediately as they turned around the corner and  into a new hallway, he saw a small group of three silhouettes dooming up in the distance. When they got closer to them, he saw that the bodies were those of boys about his age, perhaps a few years younger, all dressed in the same loose fitting grey t-shirt that Brian assumed was the uniform of Queen Mary’s. It was not exactly as official and professional looking as Brian expected a uniform to be, but then again, the overly formal aspects of uniforms had always been exactly what had made him feel awkward and out of place wearing his high school uniform. So even though he would have preferred something more form-fitting than those grey shirts, he liked them better than the thought of being forced to wear a complete suit again like he had been in high school.

Just when they were about to pass the three boys that seemed to stare at Brian rather intensely - probably because he was not wearing either a staff uniform or one of those beforementioned grey t-shirts - one of the three called out to his mentor, startling Brian with his directness and loud voice.

‘Nolan! I asked if I could have my yo-yo back after it was confiscated last week, but they won’t let me!’ the unknown person complained as if he had been seriously wronged by having a toy of his taken away from him. Then again, it seemed to Brian that there was not too much to do around this place, and that you should probably cling onto everything you could use to amuse yourself, even if it was just a yo-yo.

‘I’m sorry, Joe, but I’m not your mentor. You should ask Derek,’ Nolan told him calmly.

‘But Derek never lets me have anything! He wouldn’t even let me breathe in the air of this place if he could,’ the boy pouted. His voice was vulnerable, close to a whine even right now, making Brian wonder how he managed to go from angry and indignant to sad and vulnerable in all of three seconds. At the same time, it was a comfort to know that apparently there were people with even more rapidly switching moods than he had himself.

‘I’m sure it’s not that bad,’ Nolan said with a bit of a chuckle, especially when his interlocuter shook his head vehemently in disagreement to this claim. ‘But I’ll have a word with him when I see him.’

‘Thank you!’ the boy said in a much more cheerful voice right now, giving Nolan a thankful pat on the shoulder before he and his companions moved down the hallway again. Brian turned his head around to look at this person, whose coming and going had been hectic like a hurricane in all but twenty seconds. He wondered what his medical diagnosis was, and what kind of treatment he was receiving at this place. Thinking about all of this suddenly made him wonder whether it was appropriate, socially accepted, or even legal to ask people what their diagnosis was, or if it was some kind of unspoken don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy around this place. He had read once that it was not socially acceptable to ask other prisoners what they were in for, and wondered if the same rule applied in mental institutions. He was curious to discover what kind of people he was dealing with at this place, but he could also get behind the appeal of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell kind of policy. After all, now that he was applying the concept of having to tell people his diagnosis to himself, he realised that he certainly wasn’t looking forwards to having to tell everyone what was wrong with him.

They wouldn’t understand it anyway.

He didn’t even fully understand it himself.

When he took all of his thoughts together and came to the conclusion that he might never find out what got individual people to this place - and that this might be best for all of them - he decided that he at least wanted to get an image of just about what kind of people were being treated under the same roof as he was.

‘So what’s wrong with the people in here? What’s, eh… what do they suffer from?’ Brian corrected himself swiftly while following Nolan further down the hallway on their quest to the laundry room.

‘Very different conditions, to be honest,’ Nolan replied. ‘A large part of the people here, like you, suffer from depression. But besides that, people are suffering from other personality- and mental disorders. As you’ve probably heard, we’re all inclusive, meaning that we try to help everyone.’

 _I’ve noticed. You were even willing to help a hopeless case like me and my diagnosis that isn’t even an officially recognised diagnosis yet,_ Brian thought dimly.

‘If I remember correctly, we currently treat people with posttraumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia and bulimia, manic depression, extreme anxiety, antisocial personality disorder, but also patients with behaviour issues. Think about anger and aggression issues, intentions to either engage in self-harm or harm people around them, substance abuse…’

‘Aren’t those very different things? Substance abusers and people with schizophrenia?’ Brian asked.

‘They are, but we do make sure everyone in here is being seen by psychiatrists and therapists who are professionals in the field of their illnesses and problems,’ Nolan said as to take away potential worries that the mix-up of very different patients could make for a less good treatment. ‘And after all, the thought behind this clinic being as broadly oriented as it is, is that by placing people from very different problematic backgrounds and mental problems together, we can all learn from each other, and…’ Nolan took a second to think, but he didn’t even seem to know himself what he was trying to say. ‘… you know, prevent each other from going down the wrong path. In the case of behaviour issues, that is,’ he added before he fell silent. He probably realised the same thing as Brian did at the same moment - that bad behaviour usually triggered others to follow, that people seeing others doing drugs were more likely to start doing drugs themselves, that people from aggressive background tended to be more aggressive in their behaviour themselves… All of which made Brian even more doubtful about the effectiveness of his stay at this clinic.

‘Anyway, what more do we have here?’ Nolan said as if to save their conversation from heading into total awkwardness. ‘Some religious fanatics, people with a multiple personality disorder, gender identity disorder…’

‘Meaning that you feel like your assigned gender doesn’t match who you feel you are?’ Brian asked, and Nolan nodded pensively while continuing their way to what seemed to be the completely opposite side of the building. ‘I don’t think that’s a mental disorder, to be honest?’ Brian said carefully with an audible question mark behind his sentence, turning his statement into something that was closer to a question. He did this a lot lately, whenever he had an opinion but wasn’t sure what others would think about it - or if he wasn’t sure if his depression and borderline weren’t messing up his ability to think logically. Right now, however, it seemed like there was nothing wrong with his brains, but with society, if Brian was to believe Nolan.

‘Nor do I,’ Nolan said as he stopped in front of yet another door on which he did not knock yet; he seemed to be wanting to get something off his chest first. ‘But I’m afraid I don’t make the rules in the world of psychiatry. If I could, things would go differently here,’ he said with a sad smile that both comforted Brian by hearing about his mentor’s good intentions, but simultaneously made him feel anxious thinking about what on earth was going down here at this place if the staff did not agree with its operation.

As if he could feel his anxiety, Nolan added: ‘Not so much here as in at Queen’s Mary, but more here as in the world of psychiatry and mental health care. Although I do admit that there are of course a few things around this specific place that could go better. Communication, more staff at the busiest hours of the day, clearer administration of medicines and therapy procedures… But nothing you have to worry about,’ he said quickly. ‘The only thing you have to worry about right now is what shirt type you need,’ Nolan smiled when he opened the door to the laundry room. Brian followed him, and they ended up in a rectangular space filled with washing machines at the left side, ironing boards and drying racks in the middle of the room, and again a space of wide pigeonholes against the wall on the left. Baskets of laundry were all over the place, and within the disorganised looking room, a handful of people were quietly working on ironing, cramming clothes into the washing machines, hanging wet garments over the drying racks, and folding clothes, the soft sound of a radio playing in the distance being the only thing to break the silence.

‘Hi, guys,’ Nolan said to the group, receiving a handful of polite but somewhat distant greetings in return that confirmed that these people were engaged in their tasks. ‘So this is where you can drop off your laundry and pick it up two days after again. You put your clothes and a name tag in one of the inboxes,’ Nolan turned to Brian while pointing at the pigeon holes at the left side of the wall on the right, ‘and then two days later you can pick it up from the outboxes.’ Brian nodded in understanding; it sure sounded logical and organised, something he could definitely appreciate in a hectic time like this. ‘We have a schedule for when to bring your laundry here to make sure our assistants and volunteers here won’t get flooded under a pile of dirty clothes on some days and have nothing to do on other days. I’ll make sure they’ll put you on the schedule one of these days.’

‘Are these people volunteers?’ Brian asked; they all wore similar looking grey shirts that he had seen on the boys in the hallway, suggesting that all these people - apart from one in a staff uniform towards the left side of the room - were psychiatric patients, just like him, making him wonder if they truly ‘volunteered’ to do this job, or if it was part of some kind of programme in here that stated that the patients should run the place themselves. _A bit like prisons and concentration camps,_ he found himself thinking, but quickly pushed this through that was both inappropriate, an unfair comparison, and wrenched way out of context, out of his mind. It was more than logical to expect some kind of compensation from the patients for letting them stay here and receive treatment for months or even years in a row, right?

‘Well, the man standing at the far right is part of our staff, so he works here full time. Then we used to work with corvee shifts in the laundry room, as well as in the canteen and the kitchen and all… But that didn’t really work out; people didn’t show up or weren’t doing anything or molested the whole shebang. The anger issues I mentioned earlier,’ Nolan added when Brian gave him an odd look as to ask him why on earth people would go around throwing the furniture all over the place - even though he had to admit that he had to oppress the tendency to smash something to pieces himself also at this point. ‘So now you can just sign up to help out, which works a lot better. We don’t always have enough volunteers here to get the job done on time, but generally we have a small group of people we can rely on to help us out here each day, which we’re very thankful for.’

Helping out in the laundry service room all day long was not exactly the kind of treatment Brian had been expecting from a psychiatric institution, but for all he knew it was very therapeutic - it sure was quiet and peaceful in this room, after all. If most of the institution’s current population consisted of loud and noisy people like the ones they had crossed in the hallway, Brian could totally understand why the quieter people would go to a place like this. Perhaps he would even soon find himself washing and ironing clothes in here if the fuss would become too much for him.

‘Okay, so the uniforms then,’ Nolan continued, moving towards a cabinet next to the row of washing machines. As he tore open the door, he had to push the stacks of clothes back into place before they would fall and form a mess of faded, greyish polyester on the floor beneath. Nolan took one pile of shirts out of the closet and quickly shut the door behind him. Placing the pile on the washing machine closest to them, he invited Brian to stand next to him when he unfolded some of the shirts.

‘There are three types of shirts you can choose from; we have regular T-shirts with a round neckline, polo shirts, and shirts with buttons for which we haven’t really figured out a name yet,’ Nolan snickered while holding up a grey shirt with a vertical row of three buttons running down its neckline. Brian didn’t have to think for too long; the loose fitting t-shirts he had seen most people around here so far wearing were not exactly his cup of tea, he would feel awkward wearing something as ‘formal’ as a polo shirt, so the somewhat tighter fitting shirt with three buttons that might or might not have been purely decorational, was what he opted for.

‘I’ll take these,’ Brian said with a nod towards the shirt Nolan was still holding up for him to see. ‘And I believe they’re called Henley shirts.’

‘Oh, that’s good to know,’ Nolan said. ‘And a good decision, because we have plenty of those left. Most people simply choose the t-shirts because those are easier,’ Nolan told him while opening the closet again. ‘Would you like long or shirt sleeve?’

‘Long,’ Brian replied a bit too quickly to sound casual about it, and he cleared his throat before adding a somewhat awkward explanation to his choice: ‘I eh, get cold very easily.’

‘It’s also not very warm in here anyway. The hallways and the cafeteria are not properly heated, so wearing long sleeves might be a good idea,’ Nolan told Brian while picking up a new pile of shirts from the overly stocked closet. Brian nodded in agreement, even though he had completely other reasons for wearing long sleeves than simply defying the cold.

‘I think a size M will do for you, right? If we don’t want the sleeves to be too short on you,’ Brian’s mentor pondered out loud. He pulled a shirt out of the stack - not seeming to mind or even pay attention to the fact that this caused the entire pile to topple - and held it in front of Brian’s torso, comparing the sleeve length to Brian’s arms. However, when the both of them agreed that this size should work for him, Nolan said something that managed to make Brian’s heart skip a beat.

‘You can try it on to see if it fits correctly,’ Nolan said while pressing the grey shirt into Brian’s hands, leaving the boy paralysed for a moment at just the thought of having to pull off his current shirt and exchanging it for the new one he had been given. It was not just that he was more than a little self-conscious about his lanky body; it was more that there were things on it that he preferred to keep hidden from the outside world, and certainly from the staff of this place.

‘You mean, eh, now? Like, here?’ Brian stammered a bit awkwardly, crumpling the fabric of the shirt between his fingers out of nervousness.

‘Yes, just here,’ Nolan said, obviously not seeing what the problem was. ‘Don’t worry, the boys in here have seen people pulling shirts on and off often enough, you won’t shock them with your bare torso,’ Nolan said with a smile as to probably try and comfort him, but which didn’t work on Brian, who just stood there with the shirt crumpled up into a ball by now.

 _It’s not so much the torso that’s the problem,_ Brian thought dimly while thinking of an excuse not to have to do this right here right now. ‘Can’t I just get changed later? Or is there a bathroom somewhere around here?’ he said while looking around as if this specific place could be found within the laundry room, but Nolan shook his head.

‘Not anywhere near here. But I won’t look, if that’s what’s making you feel uncomfortable,’ Nolan told him, and Brian nodded at last - he decided that this was about as much as a good deal he could get concerning getting undressed in public if he did not want to reveal his secrets to his mentor.

‘Alright then,’ Brian eventually whispered, turning around to face the wall when despite his promise, his guide did not seem to look away from him. He placed his shaky fingers on the hem of the pink and purple striped shirt he was currently wearing and slowly dragged the fabric up, until he decided that removing and replacing the fabric quickly might be a better idea if he did not want to get caught. He reached out to pick up the shirt he had put down on the washing machine a moment earlier, but this turned out to be a bad move, and he knew it had been when he heard his mentor calling his name.

‘Brian?’ the voice behind him said, making Brian’s movements freeze and hope this would be all his mentor was going to say to him, even though he knew it was unrealistic that the person looking over him would simply mention his name and say nothing more after probably just having discovered what Brian had been trying to hide so desperately. ‘Brian, can you turn around?’

Brian wanted to say _no, I can’t, I don’t want to, but_ he knew he would only make himself sound more shady and more like he was trying to hide something from the person who, with his low and serious voice, suddenly sounded way more like his superior than simply the person showing him around the place and making him feel at home, as far as this was possible. He therefore swallowed painfully and slowly turned around with the shirt in front of him to cover up his torso and hopefully also the arms on which Nolan must have started to notice some irregularities, to put it lightly. He hardly dared looking up at the person who had just called out his name, but when Nolan requested he’d do so anyway, he decided it was better to listen and not put himself into even more problems than he probably already was now that Nolan had found out.

‘Brian? I’m not going to ask any personal questions, but I have to ask you this,’ Nolan said, and Brian closed his eyes when he knew which question was going to come. ‘Do they know?’

Brian considered lying for a moment, telling Nolan that people here were aware of his self-harming tendencies and that he was going to be receiving treatment for it, but he knew he was a terrible liar and that he might end up into even deeper troubles if they found out he had been lying to the staff; after all, this did not look like a place where one could keep anything secret from anyone for a longer time than approximately three days.

‘No, they don’t,’ Brian whispered softly. ‘My former psychiatrist saw a single cut on my arm once and made a note about it in my medical records, but I told him it had been a one-time event, and we never went into it again. I don’t think it’s even in my dossier.’

‘Thank you for being honest, Brian,’ Nolan told him with sincere appreciation in his voice. This made Brian feel a bit better about just having owned up his secret concerning his self-harming past (and present, if he would be given the chance), although this feeling did not last long when Nolan added: ‘But you have to understand that I have to report this to your doctors and psychiatrists.’

‘But I don’t anymore-,’ Brian protested, but it seemed like Nolan wasn’t having any of it.

‘It’s my duty, Brian. I’m responsible for you as your nurse and mentor; I will be held accountable if anything happens that I knew but didn’t inform your medical experts about,’ Nolan said, before he continued with an aspect that sounded a lot less selfish than the first part of his speech had been sounding. ‘But most of all, I have to report this for your own safety. Knowing this, we can take some extra precautionary measures. Just to protect you from yourself,’ he said kindly, but Brian had to oppress the tendency to _scream_. He was seriously afraid he was going to yell if he had to hear he had to be ‘protected from himself’ one more time, an argument that was pulled up with everything people decided on his behalf without giving him any further explanation concerning how and why. Even now, Nolan did not seem to plan on expanding on what kind of precautionary measures would be taken for him - against him, rather - leaving Brian to wonder what kind of overbearing and interfering rules he was going to be set up with this time.

‘It’s alright. We would have found out anyway during your physical examination,’ Nolan told him, a thought which was probably supposed to reassure Brian but which once again - much like a lot of things Nolan had been saying in order to comfort him - only made him feel more nervous. ‘But we won’t talk about it anymore for now. I’ll report it to your psychiatrist and then she’ll take it from there. You can just put on your shirt again, if you’d like,’ Nolan proposed with a smile, and Brian looked down at himself to find that he was still covering his naked torso with his new uniform instead of actually wearing it. With a blush creeping up his face, he pulled the shirt over his head, tugged the hemline down, and made sure the sleeves covered every last inch of his arms to prevent anyone else from finding out about his self-harming problems.

While Nolan searched through the messy pile of shirts to find a few exact copies of these long-sleeved buttoned shirts in size M for him, Brian mentally chided himself for having trusted Nolan as more than just someone who was showing him around this place. Nolan telling him he had to report his self-harming tendencies to his psychiatrist immediately had made Brian feel that Nolan was less trustworthy than he had been thinking, even though he knew it was wrong to think about him this way. He knew that the nurse was doing nothing else than what was reasonable and probably even legally binding to do after finding out someone engaged in self-mutilation, but still it felt like betrayal to Brian, who just wanted to be left alone and not have anyone spy on him anymore, or worse than that, take measures to ‘protect him against himself’.

After Brian had been given four additional shirts as to make sure he would not run out of clean clothing in the time between the washing schedules, they continued their tour through the building in silence this time now that Brian was not exactly in the mood for talking anymore; not now that he was afraid everything he said now could be held against him later. Nolan, who either didn’t notice or pretended not to notice his renewed restraint, continued to make comments as he showed Brian around the ground floor of the building, but Brian had little to say or ask or add to him this time.

Nolan led him to a few places that he hadn’t seen yet but which were important to know about, according to the guide. They dropped by at yet another kind of administrative place where he was given a badge that contained his name, a portrait picture that dated all the way back from high school and of which he wondered where they found it, his patient number, and some kind of combination of numbers and letters that according to the man sitting behind yet another desk was used by the staff to be able to read exactly what someone’s diagnosis was without revealing to other patients. Brian had to admit that he could appreciate the reasoning behind this; having to clip this badge to the waistband of his jeans made him feel like a an open book to everyone around him who wanted to read up on his mental disorders, so hearing that no one but the staff here could decipher these codes, made him feel a little less exposed.

They left the office of which Brian wasn’t sure what they did these besides making badges, and Nolan showed Brian to the cafeteria room. It reminded Brian of what the canteen in high school had been looking like; a food bar one could line up for to walk by and receive all parts of a meal in the corner of the space, with multiple rows of white tables and matching plastic chairs at either side of them. Each table seemed to allow about six to eight people to sit at it, and if Brian made a quick calculation of how many tables there were - four rows of eight tables in each of them - Brian estimated that this place could easily hold anywhere between about 180 and 250 people. He had no idea if there really were this many people currently residing at Queen Mary’s, or if the number of places in the canteen were truly a good indication of the number of patients. Either way, just seeing the canteen and its capacity made Brian feel a sting of nervousness, and wish he could be home again, where he would not have dozens of people sitting around him during mealtime.

‘So this is the cafeteria,’ Nolan said after they had walked through the massive opened doors leading into the space and stood still at some kind of podium, below which the tables and benches were located. ‘It’s pretty deserted right now, but during meal times it can get crowded in here.’

‘How many people are here during a normal meal hour?’ Brian asked, trying not to let his nervousness to this apparently massive event show too much while he peered around the mostly empty tables. He noticed that the few people that were sitting at the tables were all wearing the same loose-fitting grey t-shirt, instantly making Brian feel like an outcast.

‘Well, I think we have about two hundred patients staying with us at the moment, perhaps a little more than that,’ Nolan told him, making Brian swallow painfully at the thought of all of those people gathering around here thrice a day to eat together. Brian had never been a huge fan of lunch break at high school and university, the crowdedness it imposed on the canteen, the noise, the mess it made. He was not sure if the prospect of eating in this hall together with a few hundred people was making him nervous because of the flashbacks from high school, or if it was the thought of sitting here together with a few hundred mentally ill people. He knew he was one of them himself, but this was probably exactly why it worried him; he knew how unpredictable he could be, and God knew what the people in here could be up to.

‘In any case, it’s a good idea to show up on time so you won’t have to wait on your food for too long. The canteen opens for breakfast at eight, lunch is at twelve, and dinner is served at six, and I’d recommend you either come in at that time, or half an hour later, when the queue for the food bar has subsided. If you’re curious to know what’s on the menu, you can check the lists next to the door. Although I do have to say we have the same food programme each week, so you’ll probably know the menu by heart after a few weeks,’ Nolan admitted while turning around and pointing at the lists hanging on the matted glass wall of the canteen. Brian nodded, even though he was positive he wasn’t going to look at them; not because he was sure he’d pick up on the schedule soon enough, but because just the thought of having to be in here with the entire population of the institution thrice a day made him feel nervous enough to not feel hungry for the remainder of the week.

Brian was relieved when Nolan turned around and made him follow him to the opposite side of the hallway - it surely felt like they were running a marathon through all the hallways and corridors of this place to Brian - where he discovered a wide staircase leading to the first floor. Nolan was the first one to place his feet on it, and Brian, after having grabbed onto the handrail in order not to lose his balance on these steep stairs while dragging his suitcase with him at the same time, followed him to whatever there was to show him at the first floor.

‘If you follow me, I’ll show you around the first floor and your room,’ Nolan said as he confidently walked past the folding doors that separated the first floor and its rooms from the staircases, quite the opposite of how Brian felt. While Nolan seemed to know everyone they crossed in the hallway by name, Brian was trying all he could to avoid eye contact with the staff members dressed in white and the patients dressed primarily in dark jeans or velvet trousers with a grey shirt of some kind above it.

They left the main hallway of the first floor behind, passed another folding door, and walked into a narrower corridor that included doors to what Nolan told him were the bathrooms at only the right wall, given that the other side was the outside wall of the building. It was made of dark bricks and featured windows every so many metres. Brian tried to look out of them to catch a glimpse of the view, but all he could see was a somewhat greyish sky that was so typical for a March afternoon in England. When he looked a bit better, he could swear he could see the remains of iron behind the glass, indicating that once there had been bars in front of them to keep people from escaping. Brian felt a cold shiver running through his spine at the sight of it.

‘Your room number is 43, so we’d like you to use the bathroom with the number 4 on it, which is meant for the patients staying at the rooms 40 until 49, alright?’ Nolan told him when he opened the bathroom with said number on it. Brian was surprised by the size of it, but could soon feel his enthusiasm sinking in when he learned that ten rooms did not equal ten patients, but a much larger number than that.

‘Now, you’re going to be staying in a four persons bedroom here, like most of our dorm rooms are. All the other beds are already taken, but your roommates left a bed for you in the corner closest to the door, if I’m not mistaken,’ Nolan told him casually while walking him over to the place.

The word ‘roommates’ hit Brian like a brick. Of course he was familiar with the concept of it, but the idea of it shocked Brian in this specific context, since this was _not_ exactly something he had been considering, let alone wishing for. He hadn’t thought about this possibility yet, even though he should have known chances were big that he would find himself sharing a room with multiple people. It was logical, after all; of _course_ a short-funded mental institution like this could not afford either the space or the costs of giving everyone staying in it a room on their own; this was a mental asylum, after all, not a luxury hotel.

Brian soon felt a bit ashamed for having expected to be given a room on his own - or, if not so much this, then for not having thought about the possibility of having to share a dorm room with others - and quietly followed Nolan until he suddenly stood still in front of a room that had the number ’43’ painted upon the door in somewhat scaled off letters. Next to the door was a piece of paper barely holding onto the plastered wall of which the texture definitely had not been designed to stick adhesive tape to. It contained three names and patient numbers, written upon the paper in pencil, with the lowest area having been cleared out with an eraser. Brian was pretty sure his name was soon going to end up being written down on top of the previous name it had contained. He found himself wondering where the person who had been staying in the room he had been assigned to was at right now; according to Nolan’s stories, he could either successfully have returned to society, he could have been transferred to this follow-up clinic Queen Anne’s, or he could have been locked away into a real mental hospital if he had not shown improvement over the course of eighteen to twenty-four months. Brian found himself shivering at just the thought it and swore to himself to never end up in that position, even though he realised his recovery was out of his hands - because if it had been, he never would have sunken as deeply as having been sent away in the first place.

While he had been lost inside his own stream of thoughts, Nolan had been knocking at the door, something Brian only realised when they heard a rather loud ‘Come on in!’ from the other side of the door. Nolan opened the door, and Brian closed his eyes shortly before following him inside the space he was going to be spending most of his time at during his stay.

‘Nolan, dear! You brought our new roommate!’ one of the people inside the room exclaimed enthusiastically, pulling a smile from Nolan’s face and an even more afraid expression from Brian’s. When the door was further opened, Brian found out that the man who had called out to them was not ‘just’ inside the room, but that he had gotten up from the bed and nearly ran towards the door until he was quite literally in Brian’s face.

Now that he was standing so close to him, Brian could hardly not look at him, and forced himself to face him. He saw a boy with an impossibly thin body, long, black hair that looked like it had been flat ironed a few days ago but which was slowly moving back to its original state of waves or curls, a slightly tanned skin, dark eyes lined with kohl, and sharp features finishing the look. Had he not been smiling at him so enthusiastically and not literally been two feet smaller than Brian, he was sure he would have backed off at this sight of this person.

After he had flashed a shy smile at his somewhat eccentric looking roommate, Brian continued to shelter behind Nolan’s body - even though he was at least ten centimetres taller than the guide - and looked through the room to get an impression on what it was like. He was relieved to find that it was not too bad looking; there were indeed four beds, two at either side of the room. The two on the left side of the room were standing a lot closer to each other than the ones on the right side for whatever reason; either these beds had been pulled closer towards each other by the two boys who previously had been sitting on one of the beds (but one of which was now standing right in front of Brian). Or perhaps these beds were standing at a ’normal’ distance, and the huge gap between the beds on the other side of the room had been created by the person lying on the bed that stood so unnaturally close to the window that Brian was sure it had been pulled to that place by the owner of the bed. Either way, it didn’t matter much to Brian how and where the beds were positioned; all he cared about was that the three men - boys his age, rather -staying at this room had indeed kept the bed closest to the door on the right side empty for him.

Next to these three people and their beds, Brian could spot two wardrobe closets, a plain table and four tip-up chairs standing in the middle of the quite spacious room, before his attention was absorbed by the conversation between his mentor and whoever the person talking to him was.

‘Yes, this is Brian May, your new roommate. I expect you to show him around, take him with you to the everyday activities, and make him feel comfortable, gentlemen,’ Nolan told him, and while the blond boy nodded and the person lying in the bed furthest away from the door remained sound- and motionless to this order, the boy who had welcomed him so warmly (be it in his own way) jumped up from the bed and stepped closer to the pair of them, making Brian instinctively take a step back as to protect himself from whoever this was.

‘Look at that, he’s got the same shirt as us! Welcome to the button up club,’ the dark haired man smirked, leaving Brian unsure if he was actually excited about the arrival of him as a new roommate, or if he was making fun of him by acting overly excited and seeing how he would react to it.

It turned out to probably be part of his character (or of his mental disorder, or a combination of both factors), Brian soon found out when one of his other new roommates seemed perfectly used to this behaviour of his friend. ‘Don’t freak him out already, Fred. He seems nice, I’d like to keep him here and not have him beg for a new room after having spent fifteen minutes in your presence,’ the blond boy he previously had been sitting next to told him, adding another option to Brian’s list of reasons of the person before him had left this room.

‘I’ll try my best,’ the addressed person promised, which seemed to be exactly what both the blond boy and Nolan needed to leave his new pupil behind in this dorm room.

‘Brian, I’m leaving you to it. If you need me, I’m in  staff room 3A, all the way down the stairs and through the hallway. It’s practically next to the lobby we came from, remember?’ Nolan said, confirming Brian’s suspicions that the rooms they had passed by in the very beginning were rooms for the staff to either work or find some rest from the crowds inside this institution - something they could probably use very well if everyone in here was as outgoing as the man currently standing in front of him. However, the purpose of staff rooms was the last of his concerns right now; he watched Nolan leave the room with empty eyes, wondering what the hell he was to say or do with the people he hadn’t even properly been introduced to yet.

 _Well, introducing myself might be something to start off with, then,_ Brian thought as he placed his suitcase on the floor next to him. But, as he wanted to reach a hand towards the boy standing about a metre away from him, this person had already gotten ahead of him. He seemed to look over Brian’s shoulder to see if the staff member had left the room and closed the door behind him properly, before he took yet another step towards Brian, reached out a hand - far enough to already grab Brian’s hands before the boy could even voluntarily do this himself - and started shaking it somewhat violently in what seemed to be excitement.

‘Finally someone new to turn our threesomes into proper orgies! I’m Freddie Mercury, how are you?’ he said to Brian, who had a hard time keeping his cheeks from growing red once he had heard this rather daring opening sentence. He knew from himself that he could be somewhat prude and that people usually told him to toughen up around the subject of sex, but God, this was really pushing it too far for Brian to keep his face clean from blushing and an awkward smile. Luckily, he did not have to worry about his new roommate getting to see any of this, for when he drew back his hand from his handshake with Freddie, the boy was quick to pull him closer and crush Brian’s body against his own in the boniest hug Brian had ever experienced in his life. Freddie’s arms felt like twigs around his back and his jutting hipbone dug painfully into Brian’s upper leg.

Brian was completely thrown off by this unexpectedly warm welcome from Freddie; he was not used to engaging in physical contact, and especially not with strangers. His first response would have been to detach himself from his roommate and take a step back, but the boy who had just thrown himself into his arms felt so thin, so cold, and so frail, that Brian did not have the courage nor the heart to do so. He allowed Freddie to hang onto his body for a handful of tense seconds, after which he gave him an awkward pat on his emaciated shoulder blades and carefully drew back his own arms to indicate it was time for Freddie to let go of him, which - thank God - he did.

‘Freddie _Bulsara_ , you liar,’ the blond boy interfered with his friend introducing himself to their new roommate. ‘And there are no threesomes or orgies or any kind of sexual activities going on in here.’

‘That’s not what you said last night,’ Freddie said turned around and said with a saucy wink, which made Brian wish he could disappear into thin air out of awkwardness.

‘Shut it,’ the boy rolled his eyes, before he got off the bed with what seemed to be requiring a lot of effort. ‘Don’t mind him, you’ll get used to it soon enough,’ he told Brian, once again a comfort that did not really soothe Brian’s nerves at all. When the blond boy had managed to stand next to the bed, he seemed to need to support himself by steadying himself with his right arm on the mattress, as if he was suddenly overcome with dizziness by the action of it. The slowness with which he moved gave Brian the time to take a better look at him; a young boy, perhaps twenty or so, slight and not very tall of statue. His skin was somewhat grizzled and the bags below his eyes suggested he hadn’t slept well for days - if at all - but yet there was something strikingly vivid about his appearance. He possessed some kind of childish innocence below the signs of fatigue; something angelic that could be found in his soft features, plush, light pink lips and messy blond locks of hair. And when he looked at him, Brian stared into a beautiful pair of light blue eyes, tired looking yet with a touch of liveliness in them.

Obviously still slightly unstable, the boy Brian had been studying walked over to him with his hand in front of him, obviously intending to bend the rather indecent topic around to a proper introduction between the two of them. ‘I’m Roger Taylor.’

‘Brian May,’ Brian introduced himself and took hold of the hand Roger was reaching out towards him. He shook it a bit firmer than he had done with Freddie, given that he had been too overwhelmed to do more than simply hold on while Freddie had nearly ripped off his hand in his enthusiasm to welcome him to their room - or to the button up club, as he had called them for the obvious reason that all of them were indeed wearing identical grey shirts with three vertical buttons down the necklines.

After a short but way more pleasant handshake than the one he had gotten from Freddie, Brian pulled back his hand from Roger and looked around the room to summarise all its inhabitants. ‘So then it’s Freddie, Roger, and…’ He looked in the direction of the last person in the room, who was still lying in bed - on top of it and fully dressed, that was - without seeming to have spoken or moved or even looked in their direction since the moment he had entered the room.

‘That’s John Deacon, record holder of the most hours spent lying in bed staring at the ceiling,’ Freddie told him casually, as if it was common knowledge, a fact which none of them could do anything about and which Brian therefore should better get used to already.

‘I heard that,’ the boy said somewhat grumpily, still not looking at his roommates and the newcomer.

‘My oh my! We just witnessed John talking!’ Roger said in response, and Brian wasn’t sure if the surprise in his voice was real or very well acted - because if the latter option was true, he might consider pursuing a career in acting when he got out of here.

 _If he got out of here,_ Brian thought dimly, but instantly mentally reproved himself for this thought; it was not that the blond boy looked too hopeless for him to believe he would ever be dismissed from this place, but it was more a reflection of his own fear of never being allowed to return to society again after Nolan had told him what happened to people who didn’t recover soon enough.

‘I’m glad to hear your ears are still working, dear. We don’t get a confirmation of that too often,’ Freddie said sarcastically, but yet there was a touch of sorry in his voice, obviously wishing it was different and that their roommate would more actively engage with them. Seeing the last person in the room that he hadn’t been properly introduced to lying in bed without seeming to have any intentions to get up, made Brian feel the same melancholia he supposed Freddie felt. He knew he had his bad days when he barely left his room or even his bed, but seeing and hearing about how John was lying here all day long, still made his heart sink in in compassion. He wished he could do something for him, wished there was something he could say to him that could at least make him look in his direction or show any other sign of human life-

‘Alright, let me see,’ Freddie disrupted Brian’s thoughts all of the sudden with a statement and question that came as a shock to him. ‘You can’t have a depression as a main diagnosis, have anorexia, or be a substance abuser. So what is it that you’re here for?’

Brian felt his face paling the moment he was confronted with this odd sounding yet correct supposition; how on earth did his new roommate, whom he had known for just about five minutes, know this about him? Did he not have the right body type or skin features to look like someone suffering with a drug addiction or an eating disorder, or did he look too cheerful to struggle with depression? Had he perhaps been standing close enough to him to read the code on his badge displaying his diagnosis, even though this was only supposed to be decipherable by the medical staff at this place? Would that have been the reason he was standing so close to him and acting all clingy?

‘How do you… know I’m not?’ was all Brian managed to utter in the end, not wanting to face those dark kohl-lined eyes but at the same time also not managing to look away. There was something about them; something mysterious, something that freaked Brian out yet also drew him to them…

‘I can tell by your hands,’ Freddie told him casually. ‘Your fingertips are too clean; had you been a substance abuser, they would have turned yellowish. There are also no cuts or wounds that suggest self-harm, which means you don’t suffer from a depression. And by the lines of your palms and the phalanges of your fingers…’ The boy came closer and pulled up Brian’s hands, and Brian was too starstruck to pull them away from the grip Freddie’s twig-like fingers had on him. ‘… are not visible enough. Had you been inflicted with an eating disorder, they would have been better visible through the skin,’ Freddie continued as if deducting all this information from seemingly out of nowhere was the most normal thing in the world and absolutely no reason for his victim to freak out.

Brian swallowed painfully while staring at his own fingers between those of Freddie. He had no idea how on earth to react to this mysterious talent of his roommate, which lead to a somewhat awkward silence before he could finally manage to choke out one word that contained all of the emotions currently running through his brains.

‘How-‘

‘I’m quite the Sherlock Holmes around here,’ Freddie hummed contentedly, but he seemed to be the only one satisfied with the deduction theories he had just played off.

‘Shut up, Bulsara, you’re freaking him out,’ Roger reproved his friend - at least, Brian supposed that giving the bony man a stump against his ribcage and receiving a pat against his hair in return was their way of letting each other know they disagreed with each other.

‘Alright then,’ Freddie gave in. ‘I only know you can’t have one of those disorders as your main diagnosis because the three of us already have either anorexia, a drug addiction, or a depression, and this _amazing_ institution,’ he said with sarcasm dripping off his voice, ‘feels like it’s a great idea to place people with different problems together in rooms for some reason. They probably fear that if you’d place a group of, let’s say, bulimics together in a room, they would encourage each other to become… more bulimic, I guess.’

 _That makes kind of sense,_ Brian thought. And even if it turned out that this theory could easily be scientifically disproven, _he_ in any case was glad to know that he was the only one with borderline in this room. It was a relief to hear that there were no others with unstable self-images and uncontrollable mood swings besides him. Just dealing with himself was enough already.

‘So, eh… who’s who?’ Brian asked, even though he felt like he was already pretty sure which one of his roommates was dealing with which of the aforementioned disorders. Freddie was so skinny that Brian was positive he could hook his thumb and index finger around his upper arm and still have a considerable gap of space between his own digits and Freddie’s arm. Roger, with his shaky body and greyish glow hanging over his face, looked like he was experiencing cold turkey symptoms, suggesting he had been a substance abuser of some sort. Finally, the one in the corner - staring at the ceiling instead of joining in on the somewhat strange conversation - was the only one left, and seemed to be the perfect candidate to suffer from a depression. Just as Brian looked at this last mentioned person, John nearly startled him by speaking up from out of nowhere.

‘Your deductions were unprofessional, Bulsara. The story about the lines in the palms is plain nonsense, yellow fingertips suggests _smoking_ and _not_ substance abuse, and how many more times do I have to remind you that self-harmers don’t cut where it’s visible?’ he enumerated all the mistakes his roommate had made during his so-called ‘deductions’ in a voice as if he was getting rather tired of Freddie pulling off these tricks incorrectly all of the time. But rather than admitting he had been mistaken or even recognising he had heard the lecture John had given him concerning his obviously not so spectacular medical knowledge, Freddie jumped right back to investigating their newest roommate again.

‘Are you saying he is a self-harmer after all?’ Freddie said with renewed interest to Brian, making the boy involuntarily taking a step back from him. His comfort level, which had not been too high when he had been welcomed to his new place by Freddie, and had decreased further during the suggestions he had made based on how he looked and the rest of the medical examination, really took a flight downhill now that this person who hadn’t shared a single word with him or even seemed to have looked in his direction as far as he was aware off, was still able to tell him (and conveniently also the rest of the room) that he used to engage in self-harm. _God, what kind of place and with what sort of people had he ended up with?!_

‘I would tell you to lift up his sleeve and see it for yourself,’ John told him with a touch of certainty in his voice that made Brian shiver deep inside. ‘But he seems terrified enough of us already, so you’d better lay your hands off of him,’ he then suggested - ordered, rather - and Brian was glad to find that it seemed to refrain Freddie from bringing up his hand even further to probably indeed tug his sleeve up his lower arm and see for himself.

‘I’ll keep my hands off him. For now, then,’ Freddie said with a wink, once again making Brian unsure how or where to look. With a gesture of his hand, he invited Brian to sit with Roger and him on the opposing beds - the ones they had pulled so closely against each other. He gave him a kind smile when Brian, be it somewhat shakily, obeyed to his order and sat down on the bed across from him.

‘Good, let’s get back to normal for a moment,’ Freddie said in a now much more serious voice. ‘So this is our story. Roger is recovering from a heroin addiction, John has a major depressive disorder, and I’ve been battling with anorexia since I was sixteen,’ Freddie summarised the situation for Brian. He allowed Roger to lie down with his head in his lap; his fingers, that seemed to consist of nothing but phalanges covered with a thin layer of skin around it, carefully tugged their way through Roger’s uncombed blond hair. ‘Are you still willing to tell us what you’re here for, or have we scared you off too badly, darling?’

There was suddenly something sweet about Freddie’s voice, something confidential, something vulnerable even, perhaps. Either way, the question he had asked, in combination with the way he was softly stroking Roger’s hair and eventually moved down to his cheek, exposed a whole different side of the boy who had first seemed to be made up of pure energy and excitement. Brian now saw someone with a caring personality, very much inflicted with how the people around him felt and how he could make them feel better. And even though Brian could not fully trust him - or _anyone_ in this room or around this place, really - Freddie had managed to make him give in to thinking that he could at least answer the question as much as he was capable of.

‘No, no, it’s fine, I’m fine,’ Brian replied. ‘I’m just… I don’t think you’d know what it is.’

‘Then enlighten us, dear,’ Freddie said, inviting him to come sit with them on the bed across from them with a kind nod towards the mattress. Brian obeyed, be it somewhat distantly, but he put his suitcase down next to the empty bed he was rather sure was going to be his and moved over to the place he had been invited to sit down at. He carefully settled down on the mattress (which, unsurprisingly for a place like this, felt like it was made out of pur foam rather than out of cotton stuffing), folded his hands between his legs, and stared at his feet when he started talking.

‘It’s… well, it’s a rather new diagnosis. They call it borderline personality disorder,’ Brian told them softly, seeing how the confidentiality he spoke with sparked even more interest in both Freddie and Roger, the latter of which turned his head to the side to face him. And even though he could not tell for sure - given that the boy never seemed to move even a fingertip - Brian had a feeling that even John was eavesdropping on what he was saying.

‘Borderline personality disorder,’ Freddie repeated slowly, the voice in which he said it betraying that he had never heard of it, as Brian had already warned him for.

‘Or in fact, it’s not even a real diagnosis yet,’ Brian corrected his previous statement. ‘They’re not completely sure about what exactly it is, what causes it, and what the defining symptoms are.’

‘So what do they think it is so far?’ Roger asked, sounding tired but genuinely interested in what Brian could tell them about this mental disorder they could not possibly ever have heard of.

‘Well, eh…’ Brian stopped, unsure where to even start explaining the whole matter without making these people think he was a total freak within ten minutes of having known them. ‘The working title of the psychiatrist working on my case and developing the diagnosis was ‘emotional instability disorder’, he eventually started off, which immediately seemed to spark Roger’s excitement.

‘You were part of the development of the diagnosis?’ Roger said as he brought up his head from Freddie’s lap to look at Brian properly. ‘That’s really cool.’

‘I don’t think ‘cool’ is the correct word when it comes to someone suffering from an unknown mental disorder, Roger,’ John’s reproving voice sounded from the corner of the room. This was a relief to Brian for two reasons; first of all because now he didn’t have to be the one to bring Roger down with the confession that it was indeed not exactly cool to be diagnosed with a mental disorder psychiatrists didn’t have a name for yet, let alone proper medication or psychological treatment - and secondly, because it was somehow a relief to him to hear that John kind of cared enough about his new roommate to listen to his problems. It meant Brian didn’t have to explain the whole matter again in a few days, or at least he hoped so.

‘Fair enough,’ Roger gave in, before turning towards Brian again. ‘Anyway, continue.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Brian said, even though he was not exactly sure what point he had to continue from, so he ended up enumerating some randomly chosen symptoms Roger had been asking for. ‘So, eh, basically I’m kind of emotionally unstable, have a lot of mood swings, can react differently in seemingly similar situations, and my relationships with others also tend to be unstable,’ Brian admitted a little shyly, looking around to see if everyone was still on board with him. When it seemed like everyone - even including John - was still listening to him, he gave another addition to his explanation; even though he did not like having all eyes on him, he felt that now he had started explaining his case, he might as well pull through with it. ‘They’re either very distant or I’m very clingy, and therefore they often don’t work out, which only makes me more distant in other relationships in order not to hurt myself, or cling together people because I don’t want to lose them like I did with others… A sort of fear of abandonment that I developed somewhere along the way of this disorder, I guess,’ Brian said, before wondering why the hell he was telling a bunch of strangers this - and even more than that, if anyone understood the mess he was currently uttering. ‘Am I making any sense here?’

‘Perfectly,’ Freddie told him without any doubt audible in his voice, and Roger nodded to give his friend’s answer more power.

‘That’s… that’s good, I guess,’ Brian mumbled; on the one hand he was indeed glad that people seemed to understand the point he was trying to bring across, but on the other hand, they now seemed to expect him to tell more about his unknown and apparently very interesting mental disorder. ‘And well, this emotional instability also works into my image of myself, and causes me to be… you know, insecure, anxious, depressed, feel empty and unloved and those sort of things…’ Brian said. Again, his two listeners just nodded and looked expectantly at him, making him search desperately for more words to add to his description of what it was like to deal with borderline - which only made him doubt even more about his doubtful and officially non-existing (or at least not _yet_ -existing) diagnosis.

‘But during the research, they found that most people with borderline react more heavily to  situations that trigger their borderline, while I was more… Well, I’ve never been a very outgoing person when it came to showing my emotions, so I didn’t really show a lot of heavy reactions that would suggest borderline,’ Brian said, then felt like he was debunking everything he had just told his roommates about his behaviour now that he was inflicted with borderline, and felt the need to make up for this again. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong. I matched the feelings of emptiness and depression and worthlessness and being afraid of people leaving me, but I lacked the acting out-part of it, such as easily becoming angry or engaging in dangerous behaviour like substance abuse…’

‘Unlike our Roger here,’ Freddie said, giving the boy lying in his lap a pinch of the cheek, receiving a bit of a disapproving expression from him. ‘But they’re still sure you have borderline, after all?’

‘Well… they think so, but they’re not certain of it. They called me ‘quiet’ and ‘down to earth’ for a borderline sufferer, but I still I matched the requirements in term of… thoughts and interpersonal relationships,’ Brian said carelessly, not exactly wanting to go into what these thoughts and this behaviour included. After all, he was not exactly excited to tell his roommates of the depressive and somewhat paranoia-like thoughts he had, and certainly did not want to admit that he used to self-harm - even though they seemed to already have figured this out on their own.

‘So basically,’ Brian rattled on before anyone could ask him about these thoughts or bring up his behaviour, ‘they don’t exactly know what’s wrong with me and it’s just… a mess, I’m afraid.’ With these words, he ended his monologue, uneasily shuffling his feet on the floor below him and waiting for someone else to keep the conversation going from now off; he felt like he had talked enough for the remainder of the week.

It was Roger who saved the day for him, much to Brian’s appreciation. ‘As long as you’re a mess, I’m sure you’ll fit in here perfectly,’ he told him with a crooked smile that even managed to pull a tiny bit of a smile from Brian’s face. He was not entirely sure if he had managed to give his roommates a clear description of what borderline was like and what they could expect from them, but at least they did not seem to be judgemental or denigrating towards him and his problems, which was at least something of a comfort to Brian and his anxiety of what the people in here would think about him.

Just when Brian wanted to open his mouth and ask his roommates a question about what it was like to live in here, how long they had been staying at Queen Mary’s, or some similar questions regarding their lives here that yet hopefully would not get too far out of their comfort zone, there was some kind of bell sound to be heard. It was loud and sharp and invasive, noisy enough to cut off any conversation that would have been going on had he spoken up earlier, and it made him look around as to find the source of the noise. He could not detect some kind of speaker hanging around in their room, but it turned out that the rest of the people in the room were exactly aware of what the reason for the ringing of the bell was.

‘Oh Lord, dinner time. My favourite time of the day,’ Freddie grimaced. Even though he pulled off a pretty funny face of which Brian was sure it was meant to crank him up, he was not exactly sure of it was appropriate to smile. After all, if everything he had heard about people suffering from anorexia applied to this boy in front of him, meal time in the presence of others could indeed be seen as a worst nightmare. It was therefore a relief for Brian to hear that there was someone around who seemed to have elected himself to be the one to make sure their impossibly underweight roommate was actually going to show up at meal time and consequently hopefully eat something.

‘Exactly. You’re coming with me,’ Roger announced, again needing a moment to prop himself up on his arms and sitting up from his previous position on the bed, where he had been lying with his head in Freddie’s lap. He grimaced a bit while supporting himself on his arms, and it wasn’t until later than night that Brian realised that this was most likely a grimace of the pain that resulted from pushing heroin filled injections into the skin if his elbow for weeks or months or maybe even years in a row.

‘Am I really?’ Freddie asked him with a teasing edge to his voice that Brian couldn’t quite place; it could either be meant to be funny or as a serious attempt to let Roger know he wasn’t going to be following him to the dining area. Whatever of the two it was, Roger - who had managed to stand up by now - wasn’t having it and reached out an arm to help (or force) his friend to get up.

‘Really. Take my hand,’ Roger insisted, and Freddie begrudgingly did so, letting Roger help him hoist his undernourished body off the bed he had been sitting on.

‘You’re quite the gentleman, darling,’ Freddie commented, and the sly smile he received in return even managed to make Brian realise that something inappropriate was going to follow.

‘Watch what you’re saying. I won’t be so gentle with you tonight,’ Roger whispered closely to Freddie’s ear, yet still loudly enough for Brian to follow their conversation and the rather improper direction it seemed to be going into.

‘I thought you were the one to tell our dear Brian here that there were no kind of sexual activities going on whatsoever, if I remember correctly,’ Freddie reminded him, cocking an eyebrow at his while placing the twig-like fingers of his hands on Roger’s hips. Roger did not seem to feel uncomfortable by his roommate touching or even holding him like that; in fact, it only seemed to encourage him to dig himself deeper into whatever kind of game they were playing.

‘Then maybe I should freshen up your mind,’ Roger grinned in response, and Freddie’s expression soon matched his. The blond haired boy threw an arm around Freddie’s waist, by doing so lining out just how skinny he was underneath the tight fitted shirt that still sat rather loose on his anorexic frame, and carefully yet insistently tugged him towards the door. Brian had no idea if they were joking and playing a scene, or if what they were suggesting _really_ contained a promise for that night’s activities. But what he did know, was that he felt rather awkward about having heard these words, especially when the two boys opened the door and stepped over the threshold to disappear into the hallway as if they had never made a single suggestive remark at all.

It was as if only when they had turned their back towards him and moved further away from him, Brian really got to see just how skinny the two of them were. Of course, he had noticed Freddie’s impossibly thin body, twig-like fingers, and hollow cheeks right away, but now that he got to see Roger’s body from a number of metres distance, he realised that he was not looking much better than his anorexic friend. Perhaps it had been in the shape of their faces - the difference between Freddie’s sharp cheekbones and Roger’s naturally softer features - that had distracted Brian at first, but now that he was seeing the two boys next to each other, there was no denying that Roger was not far away from being just as impossibly skinny as the boy he was walking towards the cafeteria. His skinniness might not have dug itself into his body as deeply as to affect the little details such as his fingers and his shoulder blades (of which Brian could literally see the shape right through the fabric of Freddie’s shirt), but he could still see how Roger’s skinny legs were swimming in the jeans that seemed to be meant to be a tight-fitting pair, and how a series of safety pins and stitches was necessary to keep the waistband around his hips as much as possible. For a moment, Brian found himself wondering if a belt wouldn’t be much more pleasant and effective to wear, but then he remembered how the regulations had stated that belts were not allowed at Queen Mary’s, which was probably a rule that emerged from some kind of anti-suicide protocol.

But more than simply startling him with their physical appearance, by walking out of the room and towards the canteen, the two boys left Brian on his own in the room with their other roommate, the one who had not yet directly spoken a word to him. Brian drew his eyes away from the door through which Freddie and Roger had disappeared and carefully peeked into John’s direction, only to see he had not seemed to have moved a single finger since the sound of the bell had announced that it was time to line up for dinner in the canteen. It did not seem like John was planning on getting up and moving into that direction anywhere soon; rather, Brian was sure that John would stay here all night long if it was up to him, and he couldn’t blame him for it. He wasn’t exactly excited to go to the canteen himself either, and that was stating it softly.

Brian realised however that he kind of _needed_ John to get up from his bed and go to the canteen with him; first of all, because he had already forgotten how on earth to get from this room through the labyrinth of dorm rooms and bathrooms and hallways, but also because he did not dare to go on his own. He knew he could probably just follow the multitude of people currently moving through the hallway and going downstairs, but he was too shy and afraid to simply jump into the crowd and follow the masses to the canteen, let alone to sit down somewhere at a random table with random people he had never seen before. He needed to convince John to go with him one way or another, but how was he going to succeed in this if he had not even shared a single word with the person he hardly dared to open his mouth around, let alone speak directly to him?

Brian stood up from the bed he had been sitting on, hoping that this movement might give a hint to John that he should follow his example. But, not unlike his expectations, John did not seem to move, breathe, or even blink. He simply looked at the white plastered ceiling above his bed, leaving Brian to fumble for a way to convince him to get up, or just to communicate with him, for a start.

‘Are they always this touchy-feely? Roger and Freddie, I mean?’ Brian clarified with a nod towards the door through which their roommates had just disappeared. It remained silent for a while - just for a few seconds, but that turned out to be a long enough time for Brian’s cheeks to start glowing in some form of embarrassment. Maybe it had been a stupid idea to talk about their roommates as a conversation starter; maybe John would think of him as being a gossip, maybe he didn’t want to talk about his obviously much more active roommates, or maybe he plainly didn’t want to talk to Brian like he did not seem to want to talk with anyone. But just as all these ideas running through his head made Brian want to climb into the bed he had been assigned to and curl up and die, John spoke up.

‘Since they decided to be a couple, about a month ago, they’ve been like this,’ John mumbled, making Brian look into his direction in an emotion that was more than surprise. He had already given up on his first go at interacting with John, and to find that this lame opening sentence about how their roommates couldn’t keep their hands to themselves was working out in the end, was not something Brian had expected. Still, even though he was relieved that he seemed to be getting through to John, the fact that what he had been asking what turned out to be a stupid, made the blush on Brian’s face live up again.

‘Oh sorry, I didn’t know,’ Brian mumbled without facing John, feeling kind of childish and awkward for not having realised sooner that their roommates were together.

‘I don’t blame you. They bicker more than they kiss usually,’ John informed him with what Brian was positive was the first emotion in his voice that he had heard since he had entered this room. He looked over to see if this emotion also shone through on his face, but he saw nothing but a straight line for his mouth, even when he added a mildly sentimental: ‘But they do love each other.’

It was this short but somewhat affectionate description of what Roger and Freddie’s relationship was like that made Brian feel a bit more comfortable around the boy whose quietness and coldness still made him fear him. Even though these feelings continued, John had at least proved to Brian that he had feelings of some sort, which Brian found to be a great comfort in his own condition. The idea of living together with someone as numb and immune for pain and emotions as the leg of a chair, was not exactly appealing to Brian while suffering from an emotion regulation disorder which caused him to feel emptiness, depression, helplessness, and dependence to rush through his body.

‘Come, we should go,’ John suddenly said, surprising Brian with his directness when he propped himself up on his elbows, sat upright, and jumped off the bed without any of the difficulty that Freddie and Roger had been having when trying to push their malnourished bodies off the bed. Now that John had gotten up from the bed and was standing next to it, Brian could see that he was perfectly skinny, but luckily he was nowhere as affected by his illness as their anorexia and drug addiction affected roommates - a thought that Brian found to be somewhat comforting in the middle of all this chaos. At least there was _one_ person he was sharing a dorm room with of whom he didn’t have to worry they were going to drop dead from malnourishment or physical weakness.

‘We’re, eh… going to dinner, then?’ Brian asked, still slightly taken aback by how sudden John seemed to have changed his mind from lying in bed and working on his world record in ceiling staring (as Freddie had put it) to getting up and mingling with the rest of Queen Mary’s population.

‘I’d rather not, but we’ll get a record if we don’t show up and sign up our names,’ John said while rolling his eyes, and even Brian had to admit that he found this to be a childish, somewhat totalitarian-like rule. It felt like they back in middle school again, where teachers would take roll before each class to make sure no one had disappeared in the distance between the science- and the maths classroom.

‘That sounds… unfortunate,’ Brian said after having thought about his choice of words for a moment - and immediately regretting it afterwards. In the heat of the moment of trying to keep the conversation between John and him rolling, he had not come up with a better word than ‘unfortunate’, so that was what he had chosen to roll with, only later realising that this was probably not a word that sounded natural when used by an average 24 year old like him.

John, of course, did not overanalyse his word choice as much as Brian himself did. ‘It sure is. But we better do what they say if we want to get out of here,’ John said when he turned around to look at Brian, who now for the first time really got to see the person he had been left alone with in this room. The long, dark brown hair he had noticed before, but not that the length of it stretched until past his shoulders and that it had a hint of waves to it. It surrounded a face that seemed a lot kinder than Brian had anticipated in the first place; he looked tired, surely, distant, which he had proved to be so far, and like he definitely didn’t want to be here - mainly the last of which Brian could hardly blame him for. But beneath all of this, there was something innocent about his greyish eyes and pale face; it was not as obviously angelic as Roger’s blond hair, blue eyes, and soft features, but it was innocent and handsome and pure in a more subtle way. There was something about the closed yet somewhat vulnerable look on John’s face that made Brian realise that this was not just another angry young man that he had been thrown into a room with, but just a boy his age who was struggling with himself, very much like he also was. The only difference between them was that his borderline and related depression were expressing themselves in overemotionality, while John had fled into distantness and emotional immovability.

‘Yes, let’s… do that, then,’ Brian said in response to the suggestion his roommate had brought up just a second ago, but which had already vanished to the back of Brian’s mind as a result of his endless inner monologue concerning John’s physical appearance and a probably completely ungrounded conclusion regarding his clinical depression. He watched while John moved towards the door and intended to follow his example, but he knew that he could not follow his new roommate before he had asked the question he had been wanting to ask for a while now. He didn’t want to _ask_ it - he was still afraid of John, more than he feared the outrageously outgoing Freddie, or Roger with his angelic appearance below a layer of physical symptoms that proved that his heroin addiction had taken its toll on his body - but he knew he could not pull himself together before he would get an answer.

‘John?’ he asked quietly, hardly daring to look at the expression on John’s face when his roommate turned around to look at him. While already having clamped his fingers around the door handle and clearly on the verge of leaving the room, John stared in his direction. The uncomfortable silence between the two of them that followed as a result of John’s quietness and Brian’s nervousness, was what eventually made Brian speak up.

‘How could you tell I used to self-harm?’ Brian’s voice was close to a whisper by now, but he did find the courage to glance into John’s direction this time. He found that John had weakened his tight grip on the door handle, and that he had turned his body towards his as to look at him properly. Even the look on his face seemed to have softened; it had gone from harsh and unreachable to a more neutral expression that even allowed a hint of compassion to shine through. That the compassion was probably directed at him for his ignorance towards the apparent visibility of his self-harming habits, was something Brian decided to forget for the moment.

‘Your posture. The way you didn’t know what to say when I suggested you self-harmed to Freddie. The way you kept tugging the sleeves of your shirt down,’ John said with a nod towards his hands, and when Brian glanced down, he found out that in his absent-mindlessness, his fingers had wandered off and started pulling the grey fabric of his shirt past his wrists. The realisation of this caused Brian to blush and rest his arms next to his body instead, not looking at John any longer while the boy continued the list of items that had betrayed his self-mutilation tendencies. But while all of his previous points had been enumerated in a business-like voice, the last thing John mentioned was said in a softer, more confidential voice: ‘And the fact that, unlike Freddie, I’m an expert in this area.’

‘What do you mean?’ Brian found himself asking, even though he realised a split second later it was a stupid question. There were only two ways someone could call themselves an expert in any kind of mental illness and its consequences, and that was either by having studied medicines or psychiatry, or by having gone through the illness themselves. Given that John looked to be younger than him and both of these studies could take up six years to properly finish, he figured that it could only be the latter option.

But even though he was quick enough to realise what John had meant when he told him he was ‘an expert on self-harm’, Brian still felt like he had not braced himself enough for the sight of John’s lower arm when his roommate pushed the fabric of his shirt back all the way up his elbow in one smooth movement. To be honest, he felt like _nothing_ could have prepared him for the image of the milky white skin of John’s lower arm completely being pushed to the background by the labyrinth of cuts and welts and scratches that covered the surface. There were marks that suggested nails, knives, razors, needles, cigarette burns, the prongs of a fork even, and patches of skin which had been mutilated by some kind of tool or force that Brian could not even make out what it was while staring at it - and that while he sure as hell was _not_ a newcomer to the domain of self-harm. Brian though he had resorted to all possible self-harm items available, but apparently there were even _more_ tools out there than he had been aware of.

It was not just the number of different marks that was visible on John’s skin that made Brian’s stomach churn; it was also the way in which they were displayed. While Brian had always been terrified of someone finding out and had therefore only made scratches to his skin in a neat row right below his elbow, it seemed like John had given up on being careful long ago. The welts, scratches, and cuts and scars were, without exaggerating, all over the place. They covered the entire surface between his wrist and his elbow, formed labyrinths on his skin, and ran straight through each other, making it impossible for Brian to even see where one mark ended and where the next one took off at some particularly badly afflicted spots on John’s arm.

And lastly, it was the freshness of some of the wounds on John’s arm that shocked Brian. Having been in this circuit himself - and still feeling the tendency to cut on a very regular basis - Brian knew exactly how long it took for a wound to heal and recover. With this knowledge in the back of his mind, he could safely deduct that some of the marks were so new and so fresh that John could have brought them upon himself that very morning, or maybe yesterday at the very latest. Just the idea of John having harmed himself mere hours ago while he was on his way to this living hell, made Brian feel queasy with compassion and helplessness, helplessness because he knew there was nothing he could say or do to save John from his toxic ways. He had been there, and he knew that the road of recovery from self-harm was one you had to walk alone.

Brian figured that the shock must have been visible on his face, because John suddenly pulled his sleeve back to where it belonged to withdraw his arm from Brian’s view and turned around to the door again so he no longer had to face him. Brian felt a sting of disappointment passing through his body; just when he had been closer to John than he ever thought he could have gotten after this short a period in time, he had lost it all in just a matter of seconds by being unable to oppress his shock when seeing the effects of John’s depression displayed on his skin. Brian could _curse_ himself for having failed to keep a neutral face and probably having made John believe he was a total sissy for being unable to face a scratch or a drop of blood without starting to feel queasy. He didn’t even want to think about how weak and overly fragile John must think he was, how he was probably inwardly laughing at him and, how he might even question the seriousness of Brian’s self-harming tendencies if couldn’t even stand the sight of scratches…

‘I’m sorry,’ John told him quietly, surprising Brian by the compassion he could detect in his voice when he added: ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’

Brian needed a second to let these words sink in; it almost seemed too surreal to have John, who had seemed so cold and distant towards him and everyone else around here, apologise for showing him the long-term effects his self-harm was having on his body. There should be no reason for John to feel like apologising to him at all in the first place - after all, knowing they were self-harmers among each other, John’s assumption that he could safely show Brian what he had done to himself should have been a right one. John could not have foreseen that Brian was oversensitive to seeing any physical harm in his current state of overemotionality, and therefore Brian figured that it was rather his turn to apologise to John, or, in any case, make it clear to his roommate that he should not feel bad or guilty for a second.

‘It’s okay. It’s not your fault,’ Brian whispered softly. There was so much more he wanted to tell John; that it was not the boy’s fault that he was unable to stand the image of scars and marks and bruises at the time, that he should not feel guilty for having shown him his arm, and that it was just his borderline playing with his emotions at the moment that caused him to be this fragile. But he did not manage to say any of this when the slightest of a compassionate smile played around the corners of John’s lips, holding him mesmerised for a second that allowed John to say the most comforting words Brian had heard in here yet - not to say the most comforting words he had heard in months.

‘I just wanted to show you you’re not fighting this battle alone,’ John told him quietly, looking at Brian for a few short but intense seconds, before the fingers of the hand he had been keeping on the door tightened their grip around the wooden handle to open the door and allow the both of them to disappear through it and move towards the place where they were expected to show up if they did not want to face any of the consequences John had been speaking of. Brian took a deep breath and followed John’s direction; he could feel his fingers trembling when he placed them against the white wooden surface of the door to keep it open while passing through it, not to even mention how his heart skipped a beat when the heavy door fell shut behind them.

The hallway they entered was empty, which Brian found to be reflective of how he was feeling at the moment. But even though he felt like the loneliest person in the world in this place, after having heard John’s last words to him before they headed off to the place they both dreaded to go to, he began to think that at least he might not be only one feeling that way.


	3. Part Three

The greyish tiles covering the floor were cold beneath Brian’s bare feet when he softly closed the door behind him and stepped into the bathroom. The space he entered was entirely dark and he had to fumble for the light switch in the darkness, but he didn’t mind: the absent of light at the same time announced the absence of other people in this bathroom his roommates and he shared with nine other dorm rooms down the hallway. And given that this bathroom - which was rather spacious, he had to give it that - was to be shared by somewhere around forty people, Brian had figured that early in the morning, before anyone else could even be awake yet, would be the only time he would have the entire space for himself.

While walking through the room without any clear destination (other than the goal of getting his feet up from this ghastly cold floor), Brian came to the conclusion that he actually had no idea what time it was at this given moment. While he and the rest of the people he shared a room with had been in bed by half past ten - both a result of his own weariness after a tiresome day and the curfew they apparently had to stick to at Queen Mary’s - he had found himself being unable to sleep until far past twelve o’clock. And even though he had fallen into unconsciousness at some point, this had turned out not to guarantee a decent night’s rest; he had waken up often enough to see every hour passing by on the alarm clock installed on his nightstand. Eventually, he had decided to give up on sleeping and turn his attention elsewhere, but there was not much to do in a room that had to stay completely darkened and quiet to make sure none of his roommates would wake up. Reading or writing or sketching had been impossible, and on top of that, the luring quietness of the night had weighed too heavy on him to simply lie in bed and stare at the ceiling the way John could apparently entertain himself all day long, so he had gotten to the conclusion that he had to get out of the dorm room and move elsewhere - and with every other door locked and secured, the bathroom had been the only place he could think of he could currently find some peace of mind.

Or well, peace of mind… Brian did not believe he was going to find some inner peace anywhere soon in this mental institution, but at least it was quiet in the bathroom, and he could move around without having to worry about waking anyone else up. He carefully took a few steps along the cold tiled floor and avoided looking into the row of mirrors above the sinks on the right wall of the room, instead focussing on the white doors of the individual shower cabins at the left. He picked the very last one in the row, just to be as far away from the door and any passers-by as possible, to be the one he was going to find refuge in for the moment. Levelling the two towels and his clothes for the day that he had taken with him to his left hand, he pushed the thin triplex door in front of him open to reveal a small space, perhaps one by one metre in size, with a showerhead and two taps below it attached to the wall, and a drain well interrupting the greyish tiles on the floor below it. It was a shower and nothing more than that; there was hardly any space to get dressed and undressed, and whoever had been the contractor building these shower cabins, they did not seem to have ever heard of the concept of hooks or shelves to hang up or lie down the clothes one obviously did not want to take into the shower with them.

Brian pulled the triplex door close behind him and secured it with a rusty looking latch to separate himself from the rest of the space, inwardly pondering about what to do with his clothes in here while standing under the running water. That was, if the taps worked in the first place; they looked old enough to date back twenty years at the very least without anyone ever having checked up on them after again. Still, he was cold and in desperate need to do anything that would offer an escape from simply lying in bed without being able to sleep until the break of dawn, so Brian simply started stripping out of his clothes and arranged them over the triple side wall of the shower cabin that did its job by preventing other people from seeing him in here, but which left at least twenty centimetres open at the underside and easily half a metre towards the ceiling. He would have preferred a fully enclosed shower cabin where no one else could see him at all, but he knew that this was al he got in this place, and he had to grasp the luxury of at least being here alone at this early stage of the day.

With this thought in mind, together with the coldness of not only just his feet but also the rest of his naked body now that he had gotten fully undressed, Brian leant forwards to open both the cold- and the hot water taps. He was familiar with the working of them, given that they had a similar system at home (be it a somewhat less rusty looking one than the one he currently had to deal with), so he knew all too well that the hot water would take a moment to reach the right temperature while the cold water would already be streaming. Normally this would be the moment he would take a step back to prevent the cold water from splashing onto his body, but there was little to no space to do this in the one by one metre shower cabin, and stepping outside of it to stand waiting in the general space of the bathroom was the last thing he was going to do while being fully unclothed. He might have been alone now, but God knew how many other insomnia-suffering people could decide to get an early morning shower and walk in on him in his current state of nakedness.

Brian clamped his arms around his shivering body and reached out an inquisitive hand to feel at the temperature of the water falling down to determine if it was warm enough to step under yet, and if not, to open up the warm water tap some more. But after having stood there for minutes and having corrected the temperature a handful of times and still being met with lukewarm water, Brian decided that it probably wasn’t going to get any better than it currently was. Feeling too weak and too depressed to move to an adjacent cabin to see if things might be better there, he simply stepped under the running water and let it stream down his body. The lukewarm water emerging from the showerhead did everything _but_ keep Brian warm, but the cold it brought onto his body at least gave him something else to focus on than how he was feeling inside at the moment, which was all he could wish for at this point in time. He had come to this place to be alone, to find some kind of distraction from the thing his own mind was pulling him through, and if cold water was part of that deal, Brian decided he was going to have to roll with it.

Unfortunately for him, his body got used to the cold water after a few minutes, and his mind returned to the topics he had been trying to escape; the idea that his parents didn’t want him any longer, the tendency to break down and cry about having been sent off to a mental institution forming a strange mixture with the numbness his depression washed over him, the fear he was never going to get out of this place, the uncertainty about how to deal with his roommates and the fear of what their illnesses were pulling each of them through; Freddie’s anorexia making him waste away what was left of his body, Roger’s drug addiction turning his physique into that of a corpse rather than that of a person, and most of all, John’s self-harming ways that he continued to stick to even while detained in a mental institution. It was as if all of these thoughts that he had been trying to repress since he had gotten in here, were now finding their way back into his brain and ran through his mind at the speed of sound, making Brian have to steady himself against the triplex wall next to him to retain his balance now that dizziness overpowered him. Everything in here and everything that had led up to him being put in here was starting to become too much for him to handle, and he now found himself unable to keep himself together any longer.

Leaning back against the corner of the shower cabin and ignoring the cold surface of the tiled wall against his back and shoulder blades, Brian finally allowed himself to let the tears he had been trying to oppress to stream free. He had known since the moment the guarded iron door of Queen Mary’s had closed behind him that a moment of breakdown was going to be upon him soon, which was exactly why he had moved away from the dorm room about ten minutes ago; if he was going to give in and cry, he wanted to be alone while doing so, being alone with his depression and borderline and self-harming inclinations and all the other things that were currently making life impossible for him.

The tears streamed down his cheeks like the water that clattered down on his body, of which the temperature was no longer an issue now that Brian had other things on his mind - all of which directed back of the topic of how badly he wanted to get out of this place. He had been here for less than twenty-four hours, but he had already seen- and gone through enough situations to be determined that this was never going to be the place he was going to recover at. The uninviting greyness of the building, the daily activities one had to sign up their names like a bunch of middle school kids on a field trip, this institution’s idea that throwing together two hundred people with a wide range of mental disorders and behavioural problems was going to be the way to create mutual understanding and natural prevention of going down the wrong path, the way everyone stared at him as if they had never seen a human being in their lives… He hated all of it with whatever was left of the burning passion in his heart, and just the thought of practically being forced to stay here until both this institution and his psychiatrist and his parents would allow him to return into society, was enough to make Brian feel like he was going to throw up. The realisation of his forced detainment in here made him queasy enough to make him want to throw a towel around his body, burst through the door, and move over to the sink just in case he really was going to throw up, but it soon turned out that he couldn’t for two reasons. One of these was that he was too dizzy to reach out for the towel hanging over the triplex wall, let alone walk out of this shower cell and move towards the row of sinks; and the second reason was that he heard the weak sound of footsteps in the hallway becoming louder and louder until they eventually stopped and made space for the sound of the door to the bathroom opening and stepping inside the space Brian now no longer had for himself.

Brian clamped one hand over his mouth and forced himself to be as silent as possible so that whoever was entering the bathroom would hopefully not notice him. Soon enough, however, he realised that the sound of steaming water was betraying him, making him feel stupid for even trying to cover up his presence in the first place. The best thing he could do now was not speaking, simply washing himself in all quietness, and sneak out of this place while he was sure whoever else had entered the bathroom had either left it again or had stepped into one of the shower cabins himself.

Just washing himself and staying calm was easier said than done, though; in the first place because the moment he reached out for a washcloth, he realised that he had not taken one with him. Even if he had, the bottle of shampoo and body wash were still standing on the nightstand next to his bed in the darkened room that seemed to be a hundred miles away and yet so nearby to him for some reason. And apart from not having the proper tools to either wash his hair or his body, he also lacked the ability to focus on himself while someone had just intruded the bathroom he had been hoping to be able to claim for himself. He wondered who on earth it was, but he knew he wasn’t likely to find this out; there was no way he was going to open the door that separated him from the general space of the bathroom and stand eye in eye with whoever was standing on the other side of the door of his cabin, and even if he did, he was not going to know who on earth he would stand looking at. He knew about four staff members and three patients here, but given that the first (and largest) group of which did not make use of the bathrooms belonging to the dorm rooms, and that the remaining three were all his roommates who had been vast asleep when he had tiptoed out of the bedroom fifteen minutes ago, he assumed he wasn’t going to know who the other person was.

This, however, did not stop Brian from trying to figure out all he could about the boy who had made his way into the bathroom this early in the morning. He quietly stood in the shower, even turned the tap down a bit more to further reduce the amount (and with that, the noise) of the lukewarm water clattering down on him, to listen to the intruder of his privacy. Whoever it was, they did not speak (which was probably a good sign; the other person was on his own, and if he would talk to the air around him, it would make Brian fear the people and their mental disorders in here even more than he did already); they did, however, start humming a long-forgotten Elvis Presley song while passing through the room. Judging by the sound of it, the other person was not wearing any shoes or socks or something the like, and their footsteps were so soft Brian could hardly make them out over the sound of the water of the shower falling down on the floor below him. He only heard them when they got closer and closer, making Brian believe they could hardly be more than a meter apart from him - but in the end it was not the sound of his feet and not even that of the humming to the rhythm of an Elvis Presley song that seemed to have faded into another classic 50s song Brian could not remember the title of at the moment, but the sound and vibration of triplex when the door of the shower cabin next to Brian’s was opened and shut again.

Great. The unidentified person Brian had wished for to leave and give him back the privacy he had been longing for, was now standing right next to him at the other side of the shower wall.

While listening to the rustling sound of cotton clothes being taken off, Brian pondered about what to do now that his goal of seeking peace and quiet in the bathroom had obviously failed. If it had been up to him, he would have stopped the water flow, gotten dressed, and made his way out of the bathroom the moment he heard the person he was trying to avoid turning on the water. It was just a shame that he found himself unable to carry out any of these steps of his plan; he simply stood there, aimlessly letting the water fall down on his soaked curls and his shoulder blades, listening how the man next to him happily hummed whatever song he was inwardly singing while removing his clothes, threw his towels over the wall that separated their two shower cabins (and which gave Brian quite a start), and turned on the water. Minutes went by while Brian simply stood there doing nothing; he realised that the longer he waited, the bigger the chance of him and the other person ending up seeing each other when they left their cramped shower cabin behind became, but he did not seem to be able to take a single step at the moment, let alone close off the tap and get dressed and get the hell out of the bathroom that did not feel as safe before as it had done before the arrival of the other person.

Unfortunately for Brian, it was as if God or mother nature or whatever other force reigning over the planet could feel how awkward he felt with the presence of someone else in his self-elected safe space. Just when he had gathered enough courage to bring up his hand to the tap and perhaps shut off the water flow, the relative quietness that had so far managed to linger in the bathroom was harshly disrupted by the sound of loud speaking voices - shouting voices, rather - of two boys that op top of making these noises also seemed to feel the irrepressible need to burst through the door of the bathroom. Brian held his breath while inwardly cursing the people that seemed to have made an art out of interrupting the peaceful atmosphere of any room they entered. He wished they would shut up, leave him alone, go away and never return, but the other two seemed to have the opposite in mind. The volume of their voices only increased while speaking of what sounded to be the topic of lunch time the day before, and the chaos was soon complete when multiple taps of the sink were opened simultaneously and something - most likely to be a roll of toilet paper - was flying through the air, judging by the demands to ‘catch it!’ and the image of something white flying over the doors of the shower cabins. The person next to Brian continued humming his song as if nothing was going on, but Brian felt like he was going to lose his senses if this madness was going to continue for one more second in this place that started to resemble a hell on earth more with every passing hour. For the love of the Lord, couldn’t these troublemakers either shut up or move elsewhere to annoy someone else with their childish behaviour?

Brian sighed in relief when it seemed like he was finally going to get what he wished for when after another minute of toilet roll throwing, one of the voices proposed to go down to the exercise room (wherever that might be). It seemed, however, that it had been too early for him to cheer about their departure yet; because right before they left, one of them let out an ear-piercing cry of which Brian was afraid it was not just going to trigger a headache from him (if he wasn’t suffering from one already) but also make everyone in a radius of fifty metres around them wake up at once. Worse of all, along with this deafening sound, the towels he had hung over the door were yanked away to be taken off with the footsteps and the noise that distanced itself from the bathroom when the two boys took their leave.

‘What the actual-’ Brian found himself saying out loud by now. He had made a promise to himself not to show any sign of his presence in the shower cabin other than that of steaming water, but he could hardly stay quiet now that some fool had literally ran off with his towels. He reached out a hand to the upper side of the door as if to check if the two items really were gone and if this situation was not just another instance of his imagination playing tricks on his mind, but there really wasn’t anything else to feel but the wood-like surface of the door. Brian found himself cursing under his breath; who the fuck had found it to be funny to whisk away his towels, and more importantly, what was he going to do now? Wipe as much water off his body and shake it out of his hair as possible and simply return to the dorm room to finish the job there with the towels he had left in his suitcase so far? Drying his body with his shirt? Wait until his body would dry on its own?

‘Here, have one of mine, Brian dear. Your shower’s been lasting long enough anyway.’

Brian was interrupted from his stream of thoughts that included the cursing of whoever had been pulling this not so funny joke on him and wondering how on earth to dry his body and his hair without the help of a towel by a white piece of fabric that was thrown over the wall that separated the shower cabins of him and the person standing next to him. He could only just manage to catch the heavy fabric, and much to his relief, it was a towel that he had been wishing for so badly.

‘Thank you,’ Brian sighed in relief while pressing the fabric against his body to protect it with his life, before he suddenly stopped and froze for a second. How on earth did the person on the other side of the wall know his name, and why did that voice sound so familiar to him? ‘Wait, what are you… is that you, Freddie?’ Brian asked somewhat awkwardly, frowning to himself while waiting for a reply.

‘It was the ‘dear’ that gave me away wasn’t it?’ Brian could hear a chuckle in the voice of his roommate who apparently also had decided to take a shower at this ungodly hour in time, but he was still too confused to join Freddie and his witty remarks.

‘How do… do you know who I am?’ Brian asked somewhat shakily.

‘Because only someone who’s new here would fall victim to this prank Jake and Drew pull off literally whenever they can. You’re the only person that’s arrived this week and who stays in the rooms forty until forty-nine, and who thus makes use of this particular bathroom. The other two new boys came here last week so they must have showered before at some point - let’s hope so, in any case - and then already must have met Jake and Drew in here,’ Freddie said, and concluded his deductions with the sentence: ‘so only one person remained to be tricked by them and their towel stealing business… and that had to be you’

 _He really is quite the Sherlock Holmes around here,_ Brian thought dimly to himself while shutting off the tap behind him and throwing the towel he had been given around his body, as to make sure no one could take it away from him this time. When the sound of the water clattering down on the floor around him ceased, he noticed that Freddie had already closed the tap of his shower also. That was probably what his roommate had meant with ‘your shower has been lasting long enough anyway’ - if the boy who had come in later than him and had finished his showering before he had, Brian had probably indeed been wasting too much water by his unnecessary long washing session. God, how long had he been locking himself up in this cabin to let the running water distract him anyway?

Freddie seemed to take his silence for embarrassment - which wasn’t far from the truth - and started comforting him like he seemed to be trying to do all the time. ‘It’s okay, we’ve all been there. The trick is to always hang your towels over the wall between two locked cabins and never over the door, so they can’t run off with them - that’s why I’m standing so uncomfortably close to you, in case you wondered. Also always take an extra towel with you, just in case they get hold of one of them. Or use the hooks on the inside wall to hang your clothes and towels over.’

‘Hooks?’ Brian asked, once again glancing around in the cramped space he found himself standing in to look for those items - once again without success. ‘There aren’t any hooks here.’

‘That’s because you just picked the first cabin you could find. Rookie mistake. Always check for hooks first, dear,’ Freddie told him fatherly, making Brian feel as if he was a three year old being chided by his parents for spilling his drink all over the sofa because he hadn’t held the cup upright after having been told to do so thrice already. ‘There are ten showers here; the last time I checked, cabin two had one hook, cabin three two, cabin four none, cabin five and six both two hooks, and number nine, the one I’m in, even has three hooks. It’s good to keep these numbers in your head so you don’t have to check every time you want to take a shower, but also keep your eyes open for changes. With vandals like Jake and Drew around, hooks and even entire shelves tend to disappear every now and then.’

‘I see,’ Brian said, his mind spinning to process all of this information that his roommate somehow had managed to learn by heart - and even more than that, to come up with something to say after just having been given this enumeration of the storing facilities in the shower cabins. ‘Thank you for… for telling me,’ Brian eventually managed to say, hoping he did not sound too doubtful to sound as if he meant it.

‘You’re more than welcome, dear,’ Freddie told him warmly. ‘I can hardly stand back and let you learn how things go here the hard way like I had to.’

Even though Freddie’s voice sounded loving in a nearly fatherly-like fashion, Brian could barely call his words comforting. Of course, he was glad that his roommate was willing to help him find his way around here and teach him the little tips and tricks to survive this place without going even more insane than he himself already thought he was, but the last sentence Freddie had spoken made him shiver rather than feel happy for having found a mentor of some sort around here. He wondered what Freddie was referring to when he had told him ‘learn how things go here the hard way like I had to’. What exactly did one have to learn to fit in here (or at least to survive), and what was the difference between learning them ‘the normal way’ and ‘the hard way’? What kind of unspoken rules and protocols had the population of Queen Mary’s silently agreed on, and what happened if one neglected them either to revolt or simply because one didn’t know about their existence, like he did? Did it concern just checking for hooks in shower cabins to avoid your clothes from getting whisked away, or did the unspoken moral code stretch far behind that? God, how on earth was he to find out what his fellow patients expected him to behave like, what to say and what not to say, what to do and what not to do, how to protect himself from what might be dozens of people like Jake and Drew that had been locked up in this place with him?

When Freddie’s soft humming of another nearly obsolete song filled the otherwise empty bathroom, Brian was brought out of his anxious pondering about what might or might not be, and returned to the present. The sound of a towel rubbing over skin - bones, rather - and the opening of the door next to him made him realise that he was still standing in the shower cabin without having made any effort to dry his body or hair, let alone to put on his clothes. He quickly rushed a towel along the wet skin of his torso and limbs, pulled on his underwear, a pair of nearly black jeans, and the grey uniform shirt that clung uncomfortably to the skin that he had not allowed himself to properly dry in his hurry to join Freddie outside the shower cabins.

When he had gotten dressed, Brian ran a hand through his hair that was still wet enough to probably pour a glass of water from, stopped most of the dripping by quickly rubbing a towel over it, simply hoping it did not look too ridiculous to present himself to the world outside the shower cabin he had been locking himself up in. He gathered all of the courage he could find in his body and soul and took a deep breath before he opened the latch and carefully pushed the door open.

Once he stepped outside the cabin, however, he soon found that the looks of his own hair were least of his concerns; it was his roommate who was standing in front of one of the mirrors with his back turned towards him that had him worried much more than the thought of how ridiculous his hair would look on this particular morning. While Brian himself had habitually fully dressed himself before presenting himself outside the confinements of the shower, Freddie apparently did not mind anyone seeing him in a state of undress, as all he was currently wearing was a towel wrapped around his waist that concealed not much more than… well, the area between his waist and his thighs.

And of course, all of this was fine with Brian. It wasn’t as if he had never seen a man with nothing but a towel around his lower body before; for the love of God, he had seen much more than just that after years of physical education and mandatory showering afterwards in high school. Of course it was not just Freddie’s partial nakedness that caught him by surprise or even shocked him, really; it was the sight of his malnourished body that came to him as a thunderstorm on a beautiful cloudless sky. He had been able to draw himself a mental picture of what Freddie’s body must have looked like underneath the clothes that hardly managed to conceal his skinniness, but actually seeing it for himself was a whole new level of shock for Brian. It was as if he was looking at a creature that was made out of nothing more than skin and bone; from his arms to his hands and his shoulder blades, no single body part seemed to contain even a single gram of fat. Brian could count all the joints of Freddie’s spinal cord now that he stood with his back turned towards him, but this soon changed when his roommate caught his presence in the mirror he was looking into and turned around to face him too quick for Brian to give himself a second to prepare himself for the sight of his chest.

‘That took you long enough!’ Freddie said with a smile on his face to make it clear to his victim that it was intended to be nothing more than a joke, but his gleeful expression soon faded when he saw the look of shock - horror even, perhaps - on his newest roommate’s face. ‘Oh, sorry. Too revealing for you?’ he asked him in concern, obviously never having meant to shock Brian by appearing in front of him without being dressed decently.

Of course, it wasn’t so much that it was too revealing in terms of too much _skin_ for Brian’s liking; it was more that he was seeing too much _bone_ now that the towel loosely wrapped around Freddie’s impossibly tiny waist left everything above this area bare. Brian had thought the visibility of his spinal cord had been bad already, but the way his ribcage seemed to poke right through the thin layer of skin clothing it, was even worse to see. He could quite literally see all of the ribs underneath his flesh, but also his collarbones, his wrist bones, and once again, all the phalanges that made up his fingers. Brian felt like he wasn’t looking at a human being, but at a species of an entirely different race that had appeared in front of him from out of nowhere.

Still, no matter how much the sight of his nearly famined roommate shocked him, Brian did not want to let it show; after all, the last thing he wanted was being seen as a coward, or as being repulsed by the boy who so far had been the most kind and most open person to him around this place. ‘I mean, eh… If you like walking around like this, then by all means… do so, I guess?’ Brian said with a touch of badly oppressed awkwardness, not to say completely audible awkwardness. It was all too clear to anyone blessed with the gift of hearing that he sounded doubtful at the very least, let alone to Freddie, who on top of hearing also had his Sherlockian talents to help him figure out the emotions of the people around him.

‘No, I wouldn’t want to make you feel uncomfortable. Not everyone wishes to see as much of me as Roger does, of course,’ Freddie winked while rearranging the towel in the height of his upper torso, leaving Brian to wonder whether he would have been feeling less awkward if Freddie hadn’t moved his towel but at the same time also hadn’t spoken those words about Roger and him. He sought a reason to be able to look away from his roommate and found one in grabbing the towel he had hung over the door of the shower cabin and started rubbing his hair dry with the already soaked piece of fabric that he had been needing to use to both dry his body and his hair with.

Now that Brian had found something to do other than staring at the malnourished body of his roommate, Freddie went back to doing whatever he had been doing before Brian had joined him in front of the mirror. From the corners of his eyes, Brian saw him pulling out a small glass bottle with a nude-coloured substance inside of it, which he squirted on his fingertips before applying it to his face. He watched as Freddie made small, rotating movements with his fingers along his cheeks and upwards to spread the foundation and give his face a more even and unicolour complexion, even though Brian had never noticed any blemishes on his skin in the first place. He couldn’t help being drawn to the image of his roommate applying foundation next to him; not simply because there was no need for Freddie to do so with the even skin he had been blessed with, but also because he had never seen a man using foundation. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with it - surely not, whoever liked using it should most certainly do so - but it was just that he had never seen it before. Brian himself, for example, would have no idea where to buy foundation, how to find the right tone for your skin, how to apply it in a way that made it invisible for others to see you were using it yet still give you an unblemished, unicolour skin…

‘What are you doing here so early, by the way?’

Brian was pulled out of his train of thoughts by the question that Freddie launched at him. He noticed that while the boy standing next to him was currently patiently applying foundation to the bridge of his nose, he himself had stopped drying his hair with the towel he was now holding between his two motionless hands. He wondered if Freddie had figured out that he had been glancing - perhaps even staring  - at him, and he quickly stared into the mirror in front of him to hide his shameful expression and get back to rubbing his messy hair.

‘Couldn’t sleep anymore,’ Brian said in a hoarse morning voice that made him wish he would have cleared his throat before having spoken. The only thing he could do now to not sound too stupid was cough awkwardly before adding: ‘And you?’

‘I’m just an early bird,’ Freddie said with a bit of a smile, by now having gotten to the process of topping his makeup off with a thin layer of powder, something Brian hadn’t even known was something one was supposed to do when wearing foundation. There was something apologetic to the tone of his voice, making Brian wonder if this really was the reason why he had gotten out of bed to take a shower this early. Of course, his makeup could be a time-consuming process that required for him to get up early, but not as early as it was right now; breakfast would not be served until eight o’clock, and it could hardly be any later than six right now. Maybe he wanted to get his makeup done before anyone would see him without, but Freddie seemed confident enough to show himself to the outside world without some foundation on his face. It could also be that he didn’t like having people around and preferred being on his own to do his makeup in peace, but this also didn’t seem too realistic to Brian for the boy he so far had found to be the most sociable person to be found here. Ruling out all of these possible explanations made Brian believe that there was something more that got Freddie to be out of bed at this point in time than simply being ‘an early bird’, but he just had no idea what it could be that would cause one to voluntarily get up at half past five to go-

 _Why do you always have to overanalyse every little detail of a normal situation until it becomes a such a big deal,_ Brian internally chided himself when he found himself pondering about an alternative reason to explain why Freddie was out here in the shower as early as he was. _Maybe he woke up, couldn’t sleep anymore, and decided that he needed something to do to stop himself from pondering and found this ‘something to do’ in taking a shower, just like you did. Maybe he just likes having the bathroom to himself. Maybe he just really is an early bird and likes to get things done in the morning. Whatever his reason is, it’s none of your business._

Brian could feel the blush creeping up his cheeks for having done what felt like intruding the privacy and doubting the words of his roommate, and he tried to detract himself from Freddie’s view and attention by bending forwards and rub the towel along the messy, wet tresses of hair that fell from his head. This tactic surely seemed to work for a moment - that was, until he stood upright again to look in the mirror while massaging his hair with the towel.

‘Is that your natural hair? Like, those curls and all?’ Freddie suddenly asked him from out of nowhere, making Brian stop the circular rubbing movements and look to his side to see his still barely dressed roommate now having moved on to applying his eyeliner, which Brian was sure of should have looked great on him a long time ago, when it enhanced his big, brown eyes instead of making them pop out dangerously darkly against his white skin and sunken cheeks.

‘Eh, yeah,’ Brian said somewhat awkwardly, staring at his hair in the mirror before him to look at what Freddie had referred to as his ‘natural hair with the curls and all’. It wasn’t far from the truth normally spoken; it surely was his natural hair and it certainly had some curls in in (knots, as he called them himself most of the time), but at the moment, it was wavy at the very most, due to the shower he had just taken and which had made his hair stick to his head in a fashion that made him hate his own appearance even more than usual. The thought of cutting it all off (or cutting it short, at the very least) had crossed his mind a million times over the course of the past year, and he started regretting not simply having gone through with this plan before he got here; after all, he was not allowed to hold a razor or a pair of scissors at Queen Mary’s, and given that he was not desperate or automutilatic enough to pull his hairs out one by one, he figured that he was unfortunately going to have to stick up with his pile of curls for another while.

Freddie seemed to think differently about the situation, though. ‘That’s so amazing. I wish I had hair that curled like that,’ Freddie said, and much to Brian’s surprise, he seemed to genuinely mean it. Brian could not believe anyone would want to be stuck with a mess of curls on top of their head like the one he had been cursed with, but Freddie truly seemed to appreciate his hair - and dislike his own, it turned out. ‘Mine is just kind of… wavy-curly-somewhere in between, I guess, so I always straighten it to make myself look passible,’ Freddie said with a wink to Brian, who immediately got flashbacks to that awkward time back in university a few years ago when he had attempted to flatiron his hair, which had made it look even worse than his usual curls, if possible.

‘Can I touch it?’ Freddie suddenly asked him, once again taking Brian by surprise. It was not often that he had met someone as expressive, outgoing, and straight-forward as his roommate, and he certainly hadn’t foreseen he was going to meet someone like him at a mental institution.

‘I… I mean, if you want to?’ Brian agreed with an audible question mark after his sentence. ‘But it’s still pretty wet-’ he went on to warn his roommate, but this warning might have come a bit too late; Freddie’s thin arm had already reached over and his fingers had already buried themselves into the mess of wet curls on top of Brian’s head, running themselves through it and once again making Brian’s cheeks feel like they were on fire. He was not used to having people touching him, and having his half naked roommate feel through his soaked curls while being alone in the bathroom early in the morning, made him feel a weird sting of embarrassment.

Freddie, on the other hand, did not seem to share any of the embarrassment Brian was currently feeling. ‘You’re so lucky to have thick hair like this!’ he exclaimed in a voice that once again displayed sincere jealousy of his new roommate’s hair, an emotion Brian failed to understand.

‘Well, you could have it, if you want to,’ Brian found himself mumbling, which was immediately met with disbelief by the boy who was still feeling at his hair as if it was the biggest treasure he had ever encountered in his life.

‘Why would you say that?’ Freddie said, sounding shocked that anyone wished to be rid of the hair he seemed to consider to be beautiful. Brian wished he never would have let it shine through that he was not very fond of his curls, to put it lightly, because now he had to come up with an answer that would explain all he considered to be wrong or ugly about his hair to someone who seemed to be smitten to it for some reason.

‘It’s just… A _lot_ , let’s say it like that,’ Brian sighed. ‘It gets everywhere all of the time, it never looks good whatever I do with it, it just… tangles up whenever I go outside,’ he explained, after which he remembered that he never even went outside anymore - and when he added this knowledge to the fact that there were still knots in his hair even though he hardly showed his head around the front door anymore, he added: ‘and even when I stay inside, it _still_ magically turns into a mess.’

‘There are some knots in here, yeah,’ Freddie said as he tugged his fingers through Brian’s knotted curls more than a little painfully. ‘When have you last brushed it?’

 _I’d rather not look like a llama even more than I already do_ , Brian dimly thought to himself, but to Freddie he said: ‘Brushing curls usually makes them look worse.’

‘Depends on what kind of brush you use, and what kind of products,’ Freddie replied, trying to disentangle a knot his fingers had come across. ‘What do you usually put in your hair?’

‘Shampoo, I guess?’ Brian replied somewhat doubtfully, not entirely sure what Freddie was referring to. It seemed a bit obvious to him that he used shampoo on his hair, and he therefore had a feeling his roommate was looking for a different answer. Unless, of course, Freddie was assuming that his depression had made him indifferent to taking care of his hair or even washing it - which, Brian had to admit, was not entirely false. He certainly washed his hair less than he used to now that his mental condition made it hard for him to get out of bed, let alone take a shower and wash his hair. He just hoped that his negligence to hair washing wasn’t showing to the outer world, and that Freddie hadn’t asked him what he used to take care of his hair because he doubted he still shampooed it every once in a while.

Luckily, it seemed like Freddie had just been referring to the products he used, and had not used this question to indirectly make it clear to Brian that his hair either smelled or looked awful. ‘You never put anything else in it? Conditioner, fixing spray, repair spray? And it still looks as good as it does? My oh my, you really are lucky to have hair like this,’ Freddie said with more than a slight touch of jealousy in his voice - something Brian could still not quite grasp. Not that Freddie seemed to think of this as necessary, though; he gladly rattled on about Brian’s hair while simultaneously trying to knead it into model, or whatever he was attempting to do by kneading Brian’s curls between clenched hands. ‘You know, I have some sprays and cremes and God knows what more for curly hair  in my bedroom, and I think it should work great on you. Would you let me try it out sometimes?’

Brian frowned lightly to himself in the mirror before him; he looked at his wet hair, at his roommate’s hands continuing to roam through it, and found himself wondering whether he should give Freddie a pass. On the one hand, he was not exactly comfortable with him touching his hair at the moment, let alone how he would feel if Freddie would be given the time and tools to really fumble with his locks. But on the other side, he did not have the heart to tell Freddie, who seemed so excited about the possible prospect of getting to really take care of his hair, that he wasn’t allowed to just because he didn’t feel comfortable with it. Freddie had been so nice to him, especially when lending him a towel about ten minutes ago and saving him from the embarrassment of having to put his clothes back on without the opportunity of getting to dry his body first, that Brian felt that allowing him to put some hair spray into his hair, was the least he could do to thank Freddie for his favour to him. And more than this, there was nothing that could possibly go wrong - or that was, nothing that could possibly make his hair look worse than it already did at this point.

‘I mean, if you want to-’ Brian started off, but even though he was planning to finish this sentence by telling his roommate he could go ahead if he liked to, Freddie obviously took the doubtfulness in his voice as a no, or at least as a hint that he still needed convincing.

‘My hair is naturally curly, or wavy, or whatever you’d like to call it, too. I know what I’m doing - at least, I hope so,’ Freddie told him with a smile that once might have created dimples in his cheeks, but which now just showed how deep his cheeks sunken as a result of the malnutrition he was suffering from.

‘Alright then,’ Brian said, but quickly judged that this might not have been a good idea. Surely, Freddie was happy to hear this answer, but perhaps he was a bit _too_ happy, for he leapt forwards another step and threw his willowy thin arms around Brian’s shoulders. Apart from the shock of physical interaction with this person that was practically a stranger to him, Brian felt his heart skipping a beat by the feeling of Freddie’s bony body against his. The thoughts of how thin Freddie was had passed his mind a hundred times already, but getting to actually feel someone’s physical weakness against your own body, was a whole other level. Brian’s first instinct was to wrap his arms around his roommate’s torso as to protect him from either toppling over or falling to the floor as a result of fainting or whatever kind of reaction his malfunctioning body was on the brink of.

Freddie, on the other side, did not seem to be suffering from any weakness, either mental or physical; quite the contrary, he seemed brighter and more lively than Brian had so far seen him. ‘‘Thank you!’ Freddie exclaimed, loudly enough to make Brian worry about waking up other people if it hadn’t been for the fact that the dorm rooms were attached to an entirely different hallway. ‘This is gonna be so much fun, I’m sure of it. I promise you I won’t disappoint you.’

‘I trust you with that,’ Brian said, and even though he still was a bit sceptical to the idea that anyone could make his disastrous pile of curls look better, he did trust Freddie to try and make the best out of it; not just because Freddie seemed to know and be engaged in personal care a lot, in any case a lot more than he was, but also because he seemed trustworthy to Brian for whatever reason. Even though he was careful and reticent when it came to confiding his trust in other people, especially now that his depression and borderline had really taken a hold on him, there was something about Freddie, his confident smile, his spontaneity, his bright eyes and even brighter personality that made Brian feel like he could trust him, at least with something as small as a hairbrush and a bottle of care-and-repair spray.

‘I’ve got ideas for your hair in mind already. Some repairing spray, some curl fixation spray, some wax…’ Freddie informed him while pulling his body apart from that of his roommate, instead using his hands to tug at his still damp curls again. Brian was cautious to let go of him; after all, the risk of Freddie falling or collapsing still seemed to be a realistic one to him, which caused him to carefully put Freddie back on two feet again (apparently the boy had half jumped up during his attempt to throw his arms around the back of the neck of someone who was at least half a foot taller) and gradually remove his fingers from his waistline when he was sure the boy was standing /stably/.

Brian smiled shortly at Freddie, and even a bit at his own reflection in the mirror while rubbing the towel over his damp tresses one more time. Sure, he was not a huge fan of his awkward curls and the way they never fell decently around his head, but if Freddie liked his hair and wanted to play around with it so badly, then he was willing to let him have his way. Let this bright personality have some fun in a place that seemed oriented to the sole goal of breaking people’s spirits down.

They stood next to each other for not more than a few seconds, in which Brian continued to dry his hair and Freddie brought his kohl pencil up to his eye again, but the peaceful silence in the bathroom was this time soon interrupted by the sound of footsteps and chatter emerging from the hallway. Brian found himself looking over his shoulder as if to find the source of the sound, but before he had found it himself, Freddie had already packed up his etui of cosmetics and gave him the answer.

‘Ew, other people. Let’s get out of here,’ Freddie said with a bit of a grimace on his face, pulling Brian along with him through the door to the hallway before the three boys standing in front of it could even enter. Brian found himself almost stumbling over his own feet as he tried to keep up with Freddie, who tugged him behind him at an almost relentless pace, obviously even more desperate to get away from the newly arriving people who were going to spoil their privacy in the bathroom than Brian himself was. It was somewhat awkward to stagger through the hallway of the institution in an attempt to keep up with his roommate, but at least Brian was sure of one thing now: Freddie had not gotten into the bathroom because of any conspiracies he was plotting against Queen Mary’s, its staff and its population, but because he _really_ wanted to have the space of the bathroom to himself.

# # #

During breakfast, Brian hardly looked up from the bowl of milk and cereals in front of him at the table for eight that was currently being occupied by only three other people besides him. Needless to say, these were the rest of the people he shared his dorm room with; Roger was sitting next to him taking care of a plate filled with fried eggs, toast, and sausages; Freddie, sitting across from him, toyed around with a slice he had cut from the apple that made up his breakfast; and John, sitting diagonally across Brian, was just about as engaged with his cereals as Brian was with his. There had been a somewhat awkward silence hanging around the breakfast that had been imposed on them by John, who, about a minute ago, had told Freddie to shut up and simply eat his breakfast because they all knew he just kept rattling on about the latest trends in nail polish colours to occupy himself with something else than eating his breakfast. Brian hadn’t even thought about this underlying motive for Freddie’s talkativeness yet, but even though the message had been brought to them rather harshly, there seemed to be some truth in John’s words. After all, Freddie had been looking at him rather anxiously and had spent the last minute cutting into and playing with his fruit rather than taking a bite of it, suggesting that he was indeed trying to find ways to skip breakfast.

Even though Brian found it to be important that Freddie would eat something, and didn’t want to distract him from his breakfast by bringing him into a new conversation, he figured that his question wouldn’t _really_ affect the amount of food Freddie was going to eat. After all, he seemed to be determined not to take a single bite of it, and from what Brian had heard about anorexia, he knew it was useless trying to convince him to do so anyway. The best thing he could probably do for Freddie now was cheering him up by introducing a new conversation to their table, and hoping he would at some point be inclined to eat something himself.

‘So… this is just kind of where you go thrice a day?’ Brian asked from out of nowhere, immediately feeling ashamed for having asked this obvious question out of all the things he could have asked instead. Of _course_ he knew this was where they went thrice a day - he had already gotten familiar with the scheme of things here the day before - but in his eagerness to just ask something, anything to break the silence, this had been the thing that had come to mind quickest.

Brian hardy dared to look around and see how his roommates reacted to his stupid question; but from the corners of his eyes that Roger - and mainly Freddie - looked up at him and seemed to be willing to answer him. Unsurprisingly, John continued to prod his spoon into his bowl of cereals and didn’t even blink in his direction, making it all too clear to Brian that he shouldn’t expect too much - or any, to be more precise - engagement into the conversation that was about to derive from his question.

Freddie, however, was more than happy to talk to him; he genuinely seemed to be relieved by having been given an opportunity to focus on talking instead of on desperately trying to avoid having to eat. ‘Thrice at least, and sometimes more often for public announcements and group activities and the like,’ he told Brian, who looked up at his roommate when he heard this answer. When Freddie saw the somewhat hesitant look upon Brian’s face, he justly observed: ‘You seem uncomfortable.’

Brian hastily looked away, feeling a bit award under the probing eyes of both Freddie and Roger, who hadn’t spoken yet but who surely was going to in a moment - probably once he had swallowed his mouthful of fried eggs. For now, though, it remained silent for a moment, as if the people around him expected him to come up with either a rejection of Freddie’s assumption or an explanation as to why being told they had to go to this place so often was making him feel uncomfortable. Realising that everyone could probably feel how uncomfortable he felt in this place and that denying it was therefore not going to be an option, Brian softly admitted: ‘I just don’t like the idea of this many people together in one place.’

‘Agwo… wait,’ Roger said with an apologetic gesture of his hand while he swallowed the remainder of his breakfast. ‘Agoraphobia?’ Roger clarified a  few seconds later, by which time he had already received a slap against his arm from Freddie, probably for simultaneously eating and talking.

Brian, however, was too busy figuring out what to say in order not to sound like a complete idiot to focus too much on either the indignant look Roger gave Freddie or on the baked bean he threw across the table at his boyfriend. ‘Maybe a little. But it’s mainly the thought that I have no idea what kind of people we’re being surrounded by. Like… everyone is in here for a medical reason. A… mental health reason, more specifically, if you know what I mean,’ Brian said awkwardly, but now that he had caught the attention of all the people at the table - apart from John, naturally - he knew there was no use withdrawing; he had to finish what he was going to say, even though he was starting to realise how stupid it would probably make him sound if he would voice his thoughts. ‘It’s just that I  don’t know what they’re… capable of, I think.’

It was silent for a second, but not for too long; Freddie was of course the one to find something to say in reply to Brian’s somewhat offensive sounding confession. ‘Most people in here are just as dangerous as you and me, Brian dear,’ the boy said with a bit of a snicker. While Brian supposed Freddie’s answer was meant to comfort him, he could not feel entirely relieved. He assumed that Freddie was attempting to comfort him by saying that people in here were ‘just as dangerous’ as they were, but since he was still somewhat afraid Freddie’s outgoingness and mostly towards his own reactions to new and unforeseen situations (such as the ones he was encountering at Queen Mary’s about five times an hour), Freddie’s words did not exactly come as a comfort to Brian.

Shaking off the idea that Freddie’s message of ‘just as dangerous as you and me’ could actually be a warning to him to look out for other mentally instable freaks in this place, Brian continued his attempt to explain his thoughts. ‘Okay, I’m not using the right words here. We’re all afflicted with mental illnesses or behavioural issues of some sort, right?’ he asked, receiving a ‘yes’ from Freddie, who was intensely listening to him as if to forget about his breakfast, and a faraway hum of approval from Roger, who was just starting to dive into his plate of breakfast again. With the thought that he had at least been right about this assumption in the back of his mind, Brian continued: ‘But if I don’t know what people in here suffer from, how can I take their condition into account?’

‘Ahw, you’re cute, trying to take everyone into account,’ Freddie said with a bit of an endeared smile that was similar to the one on Roger’s face, both of which made Brian blush slightly. ‘But don’t worry about that too much. Just keep in mind that most people here suffer from depression or related disorders,’ Freddie then continued in a more serious voice.

‘And even if they don’t, everyone in here still just wants to be left alone by others,’ Roger joined in in a voice of which Brian couldn’t quite determine if it was meant to be serious or just a joke. Whichever of the two Roger had aimed for, Brian himself was going for the (perhaps quasi) serious tone in his voice. Just looking around the canteen and seeing the worn-out faces of people sitting at the tables surrounding theirs, some of them talking but many quietly prodding into their breakfast much like John and he were currently doing, gave Brian the impression that a lot of these people indeed wanted to be left alone, whether they suffered from depression or not. God, the person sitting diagonally across from him was a living example of the type of person Freddie and Roger had described, and Brian had to admit that he probably fit into the category of ‘depressed and wanting to be left alone’ pretty well himself. There was of course his diagnosis which included a major depressive disorder, and the reason why he was currently keeping up with his roommates was because he felt like it was a good idea to be able to get on with the people he was going to share a dorm room with for his entire stay here, and because it was probably good to have some people around you here in order to survive and show you the way things were done here (as the towel incident in the shower earlier that morning had proved). But apart from that, Brian felt no need to be in touch with anyone else, and indeed preferred to be left alone by anyone who was not either part of his dorm room or who came in here to tell him he was excused to leave the Godawful place.

After having looked around the place and having noticed some groups where dialogue seemed to be going on and an equal number of groups where silence reigned the atmosphere, Brian asked: ‘so does that mean that people with depression or with other disorders group together here? To be left alone by others?’

‘Depends. Sometimes diagnosis seems to be a binding factor for groups. The religious fanatics sit together to talk about Jesus and the Bible every day, over in that corner,’ Freddie said with a nod towards his right side, and Brian discretely peeked over at the direction his roommate was indicating. At first glance, the handful of young men seemed to be just another group of people in here stuck with each other, but when Brian looked better, he saw that all of them were focussed around the person sitting in the middle reading from the book - most likely to be a Bible - who paused every so many lines so that the group could comment on whatever verse or psalm or whatever he had just read. They were loud, but he couldn’t make up their exact words due to the distance - and he was kind of glad he couldn’t. Just seeing their neurotic-like way of folding their hands together, forming air crosses between their chests, shoulders, and foreheads, and throwing their hands up in the air as if they had just seen the Holy Spirit in person, was enough for Brian to understand why Freddie was calling them religious fanatics, and why their dedication to faith had landed them in this place. ~~~~

‘And so do the ones with murder tendencies, here right next to us,’ Roger commented lightly between two spoonsful of baked beans, not seeming to notice how Brian paled at his addition to the conversation. ‘Well, they don’t talk about Jesus, but about their mutual interest in… murder, I suppose,’ he added in clarification with a short raise of the shoulders before he started attacking his breakfast again. Brian, on the other side, was concerned with a very different attack than that of his milk and cereals after having heard about a bunch of homicide-orientated freaks sitting at the table right next to them - and on his side of the table, to make matters worse. He turned his eyes towards the bowl standing in front of him this time to prevent himself from looking to his right, as if he was afraid that a simple look into the direction of the people who apparently were interested in the idea of murder would be all they needed to be set off and strangle him in his sleep.

Much to his surprise, it was not the always vigilant Freddie or Roger, the person who had made the comments about being located right next to people with murder inclinations who noticed how uncomfortable and anxious this thought was making Brian; it was the one person who had so far kept himself aloof towards the conversation going on at their table, or who in any case had pretended to be aloof.

‘You’re not exactly reassuring Brian about his chances of survival in this madhouse, guys,’ John stated matter-of-factly without looking up at any of the people surrounding him, even though Brian noticed that all three of them had their attention focussed on John now that he had suddenly spoken up against all odds. It seemed like no one initially seemed to know what to do against the reprimand John had given Freddie and Roger for making Brian feel even more anxious towards the population of Queen Mary’s than he had already been before this early morning talk, but of course it was Freddie whom they could rely on to speak to first.

‘You’re right, dear. Brian, don’t mind us; there are some crazy people around here, but there’s no need to worry about them. As I told you before, the people in here are just as dangerous as you and me,’ Freddie told him, but even the kind smile he flashed him could not take away any of Brian’s anxiety. Freddie seemed to be conscious of the failing of his ‘consoling’ words himself, for he quickly changed the topic in an attempt to move away from the one John so obviously disapproved of.

‘Anyway, to get back to your initial point,’ Freddie said, spinning a part of the apple around between his fingers but still not quite eating it. ‘People here sometimes group according to diagnosis, sometimes to dorm room like we do…’

‘… And sometimes because they’ve been ordered to sit with a certain group, such as our dear Freddie here,’ Roger finished his sentence, earning a chuckle from the person he was interrupting and a doubtful glance from Brian as the boy tried to figure out what Roger meant by this. He couldn’t imagine that Freddie, with his severe anorexia, would be ordered to sit with three depression inflicted patients during meal time, some of which on top of this diagnosis also had an additional borderline disorder or drug habit. It also completely seemed to go against Queen Mary’s idea of placing patients with different psychological backgrounds and issues together, as Freddie had told him the day before.

Roger, obviously seeing his roommate’s confusion, decided to help him out of his train of thoughts that were getting him nowhere. ‘Naturally he wasn’t ordered to sit with a bunch of freaks like us, but with the group in the left corner,’ he said, and this time, Brian did have the courage to look, judging that the chance of being murdered in his sleep by a dozen of people suffering from the same physical frailness as Freddie would be significantly smaller than being ended by people sitting together by their sole interest in murder. ‘That’s where the people with eating disorders sit, and they have to eat under the supervision of some nurses or mentors or supervisors or whoever works here at that time.’

Brian discretely followed the direction in which Roger was glancing rather shamelessly; he found himself looking at two tables placed against to each other to create enough space for the dozen of the young men apparently suffering from eating disorders. He could not quite see if these people looked just as emaciated as the boy sitting next to you due to the distance between their tables, but judging by the three nurses that were darting around the table and trying to convince their patients to get to the part of _eating_ their breakfast instead of toying around with it without any success - Brian could make up that it was probably a good idea to keep an eye on these people during breakfast time - and other meal times of the day, for that matter.

However, even though the idea of eating under the supervision of medical experts made sense to Brian, this did raise one more problem when he put one and one together. ‘But if people with anorexia and bulimia and the like should sit together, then why isn’t Freddie with them right now?’

‘You wanna get rid of me that badly after only one day?’ Freddie said with a touch of indignation in his voice that Brian did not soon enough discover was meant to be ironic, making him pale at the response of his roommate and immediately fall into excuses.

‘No! No, of course not, I didn’t mean it like that,’ Brian immediately blurted out, hardly daring to look at Freddie and therefore missing the smile on his face that otherwise he would have betrayed that he was pulling off a joke on him. Luckily for him, Roger gave his boyfriend a soft but well-aimed kick against the shin underneath the table, indicating that he should stop pulling their newest acquisition through these kind of pranks that he was obviously too far gone for to be able to understand at the moment.

‘Of course I know you didn’t, darling,’ Freddie said as he took Brian out of his distress by his endearing words and a gentle gesture of placing his fingers over Brian’s. Though Brian knew it was well-meant, he noticed himself involuntarily pulling his hand away, slowly but surely, not feeling comfortable enough around these people to allow anyone to become physically close to him; just sharing a room with them and sitting with them during meal time was enough contact for his liking at the moment. Freddie seemed to notice this too, but luckily for Brian, he didn’t take offence against him pulling his hand away and simply filled up the emptiness with words, like he had been doing the entire morning. ‘But I was too much of a handful to them, so Roger promised to look after me during meal time. They were glad to be rid of me, I believe.’

Although Freddie himself chuckled while uttering these last words, they made Brian feel a weird sting of unwelcomeness, made him doubt the competence of the staff even. Being glad to be rid of a patient just because they were time consuming or not being cooperative did not exactly strike Brian as a professional work attitude, certainly not for someone who chose to work in the field of psychiatry. Then again, Brian found himself being glad to have Freddie around instead of seeing him being part of the crew that was currently being chased after by nurses and supervisors in order to eat; he might be a bit too spontaneous for Brian’s disoriented mind to immediately react to him most of the time, but he did enjoy the boy’s bright personality and positive mood, something he could especially appreciate in a place like this.

‘Speaking of which…’ Roger interrupted Brian’s thoughts to continue on something his boyfriend had said a moment before about him being responsible for seeing to it that Freddie got to eat something during meal time. ‘It’s about time you start eating that apple before breakfast is over.’

‘Do I _really_?’ Freddie sighed with touch of whininess to his voice, sounding like a displeased toddler telling his parents he didn’t want to go to preschool that day.

‘Really. Otherwise we’re switching plates,’ Roger threatened, which seemed to be Freddie’s worst nightmare, judging by the abhorred look on his face. Brian understood why switching plates with someone who had signed up for a complete English breakfast was going to be problematic for the person who couldn’t even be moved to take a single bite of the apple he had been toying around with for the past twenty minutes.

‘No fucking way,’ was Freddie’s rather strong reaction to the proposal of his boyfriend that he obviously didn’t agree with. He took onto his plate in a way Brian was sure he never would have done if it hadn’t been for Roger threatening to take his apple away from him and exchange it for a load of baked beans and buttered toast and other food Freddie wasn’t voluntarily going to be eating in a million years.

However, while Freddie nearly growled his answer to the proposal at the person who had brought it up, Roger himself was starting to show a bit of a smile around the corner of his eyes. And even though Brian had only been in touch with the couple for less than twenty-four hours, he had already seen it often enough to be positive that this meant a rather indecent comment was going to follow.

‘Really not? I thought you were so fond of sausages,’ Roger teasingly threw back at his partner, who, although still clinging onto  his own plate filled - or well, containing was probably a better word - a sole apple, seemed to be able to appreciate this remark. The sneaky smile on his face told Brian that an even more suggestive comment was going to follow. He did not know the extent of it yet, but given that Roger’s words had already managed to bring a blush to his cheeks and made him face away, he was rather positive that whatever was going to come, was going to make his cheeks grow crimson in colour.

‘Depends,’ Freddie said as if he was seriously contemplating a correct answer for this question. ‘Not so much of the one on your plate, but the one down your-’

‘Let’s stop right there.’

 _Thank God,_ was the first thought that passed through Brian’s mind, before he thought to himself that he should probably look up at the person who had rescued him from even more second-hand embarrassment than these two rascals were pulling him through already. It failed to surprise him to see that John had been his knight in shining armour; of course, him voluntarily speaking up in public was unexpected, but him calling people out on their shamelessly suggestive comments very much fit the easily annoyed side of the boy’s personality - a side Brian right now was glad for existing.

Roger and Freddie, on the other side, seemed to be not too happy about having been stopped in the middle of whatever kind of game they were playing; and naturally, Freddie was the first to openly voice his disagreement.

‘Why do you always have to cut us off just when we’re starting to have fun?’ he said whiningly, probably happy for having found another reason not to start eating yet. Unfortunately for him, John was not only not in the mood for his kind of humour but could also see right through his diversions, and he was not afraid to let it show.

‘Because not all of us want to hear about your night time activities with your fellow skeleton, Bulsara,’ John said, crudely referring to the fact that both Freddie and his partner had been reduced to stick figures by their mental disorders and drug habits. ‘So _shut_ _up_ and eat that apple before I’ll call in your mentor to inform them about the _progress_ you’re so obviously making.’ John’s voice was quiet but sharp, and although Brian was sure no one outside the four of them possibly could have overheard them, it still felt to him like John had just called their fellow roommate out in front of the entirety of the population of Queen Mary’s.

The silence that immediately followed after John had made his opinion on Freddie and Roger’s dialogue clear, almost made Brian feel queasy. Surely, he had not exactly felt comfortable listening to Freddie and Roger behaving as if they were all alone somewhere in the back room of a cheap motel, but he still preferred it over the silence John’s harsh words had imposed on Freddie; certainly now that John turned to look at him with something that could pass for a faint smile on anyone else, but that was the most beaming smile upon John’s face that Brian had seen from the boy so far. It was slight, somewhat apologetic (which seemed more towards him having made Brian crawl even deeper into his shell by scolding at Freddie, than the fact that he had scolded Freddie itself), and most of all, it seemed to have something of a ‘you’re welcome’- edge to it.

It was obvious to Brian that this latter element probably emerged from his roommate’s idea that he had _protected_ Brian from having to hear the rest of the undoubtedly shameless conversation by calling Freddie out, which landed Brian stuck in the middle of the situation. Of course, he had never felt comfortable engaging in sexually explicit conversations, and truly was happy he was being spared from having to hear the rest of Freddie and Roger’s deepest thoughts. But if this meant that Freddie, the only person in their group who did not suffer from a depression and the only one to always keep the conversation up and the atmosphere high, had to be silenced so harshly that he hardly dared looking up from his lap anymore, it simply wasn’t worth it. The only problem with this conclusion was that Brian had no idea how to share it with the others; he felt sorry for Freddie, but he didn’t feel like he could tell John that he disagreed with the way he had been speaking to their roommate. He found himself being unsure if this was because he didn’t _dare_ to stand up against John and his empty, dark eyes and absent attitude, or if he didn’t want to do so because he felt this strange, half-established connection starting to build up between John and him. There was something about the quietest member of their dorm room that made Brian feel connected to him; maybe it was his introvertedness, his need for peace and quiet, the knowledge that they both suffered from depression and self-harm, the idea that John seemed to be trying to protect him and help him stand up against this cruel place (be it in his own way, such as showing him the mutilations he had brought upon his own arms, and telling Freddie to shut up both when making suggestions about Brian’s mental background or when making sexually suggestive comments like he had done about a minute ago). Whichever of the two it was, not daring to or not wanting to, it made Brian unable to either say something in defence of Freddie or against John’s way of treating him.

Therefore, Brian ended up saying nothing (and feeling bad about doing so); and since the rest decided to do the same, they ended up eating the rest of their breakfast more quietly. That was, as far if you could call it ‘quietly’ after Freddie, after a few minutes of silence in which he finally got around to eat a slice of his apple, got the courage to speak up again, much to Brian’s relief. He was glad to obey to Freddie constantly demanding his attention by pointing at certain situations or people (be it in a somewhat more disguised way when it came to a human person instead of a schedule hanging on the wall or a camera that was secretly monitoring their every move); both because it broke the awkward silence hanging around their table, and because he was relieved to see that John’s hurtful words hadn’t left a permanent impression on Freddie. In all honesty, when listening to Freddie as he happily chattered about the place and people surrounding them, receiving feedback and comments that actually fit the topic this time from Roger, it seemed to Brian that the topic was more on his mind than it was on the one against who the sermon had been directed - which he decided to take as a good sign.

Brian patiently listened and politely nodded and shook his head at the right times while Freddie ‘guided’ him through the canteen from their spot, but he could not help glancing at John every once in a while. He sat all the way at the edge of the table as to distance himself from others as much as he could, prodding his spoon into the cereals of which Brian was sure were getting soggy by now but eating about just as much from the substance as Freddie. He seemed a million miles away from the conversation that was going on at the table and of which he was stubbornly keeping himself aside from. In fact, he was so absent-minded that Brian wasn’t sure if he ignored the sound of the bell when it rang through the space of the canteen and shook everyone - especially Brian himself - up, or if John really was too far away in his own thoughts to hear the ringing that undoubtedly announced the start of some kind of activity, even though Brian was unsure which one this was.

The rest of the people he was sitting with of course did know whatever the ringing sound was supposed to indicate. He didn’t even have to flash a questioning glance in the direction of his roommates; they had probably already anticipated his lack of understanding towards the bell, and Roger was quick to inform him.

‘Oh, that was the bell. Time for group sessions.’

Well, that certainly did explain the cause of the sound, but unfortunately for Brian, he had no idea what kind of group sessions his roommates were talking about. He sat and watched as people stood up from their chairs, dumped their plates and bowls on the bar of the canteen without any kind of visible protocol that protected the place from getting cluttered all over, and walked towards certain central points or corners of the canteen where they grouped together for a reason that was unknown to him.

‘Group sessions?’ Brian repeated in a bit of a nervous squeak that very much reflected his inner anxiety to this new concept that was being presented to him. He had no idea what they were going to do, but given that he had never been much of a group worker - always having preferred individual homework assignments, sports, and activities - the words ‘group assignment’ did not sound like something he was going to enjoy. Like something to fear, rather; especially when Freddie explained the concept as if it was the most common thing in the world while his explanation of the upcoming activity was only making Brian feel more nauseous with nervousness.

‘The ones on your schedule. After breakfast you have group therapy sessions with a supervisor, based on your diagnosis,’ Freddie told him after he had jumped up from his chair and picked up the tray in front of him, seeming to be all too excited to get rid of the food on it. While he seemed relieved - be it about getting to dump his food, that was - the answer Freddie gave made Brian feel as if someone had just punched him in the stomach. If they were to be classified according to diagnosis, they were going to be separated from each other, meaning that he would have to go alone to these Godforsaken group sessions or whatever they might be. Brian felt sweat breaking out on his brow; just being surrounded by hundreds of people (let alone mentally unstable people of some sort) in this canteen was already making him feel queasy, and that was while under the ‘protection’ of his three roommates while not dealing with any of the other people in this place. Being torn away from the only few people he had come to make the acquaintance of to instead be dropped off with a group of strangers for whatever kind of activity they were going to have to engage in for the sake of therapy or leisure time or bonding, was simply too much to handle for him at the moment.

‘So we… we won’t be together?’ Brian stood up along with Roger and asked the question in a voice he could not help being squeaky, which earned him a compassionate look from Freddie and Roger, who obviously understood he did not want to do this on his own.

‘I’m afraid not, love. John was classified in a depression talk group, I in one for eating disorders and body issues, and Roger in one for substance abuse. Now I don’t know what borderline falls under…’ Freddie pondered out loud, looking up at the rest of the group but receiving an apologetic shrug from Roger and no reaction whatsoever from John, as could have been expected. With no answer to his question, Freddie went on to ask him: ‘What group number are you in?’

 _Oh, great, that was yet something else to worry about,_ Brian thought to himself. _I didn’t have enough of that yet anyway_. ‘I have no idea,’ he admitted softly, starting to feel a tinge of nervousness that added up to the anxiety the mentioning of the existence of the group sessions had given him.

‘Didn’t they tell you?’ Freddie asked him with a bit of a frown that Brian immediately took as an accusative one, as if his roommate was sure they had told him but that he had just been too stupid or too neglectful to remember. He felt panic welling up by now, anxiously searching through all the mental notes he had made to himself over the course of the last day. There were many things he remembered, such as details about the laundry room and the medicine intake regulations and where to sign oneself up for mealtime, but in the storm of information he had been given, he undoubtedly had also forgotten a lot of things - and the group name might well be part of them.

‘I don’t know. I don’t remember,’ Brian said as calmly as he could, but it sounded terribly troubled even to his own ears - not to even mention that the others could detect it.

‘No need to worry,’ Roger told him in a vain but well-meant attempt to soothe his nerves, shoving one more spoonful of baked beans into his mouth before saying: ‘We’ll figure it out. Who’s your mentor?’

‘Nolan,’ Brian whispered, desperately hoping his roommates knew who he meant without using the guy’s last name, given that he had no idea what this would be. Luckily, they instantly knew who he was talking about, which Brian knew shouldn’t surprise him. After all, this was a small and probably - despite the distancing and absent-mindedness that was often part of depression and other mental illnesses people were in here for - tight-knit community, in which everyone knew exactly who everyone was; at least when it came to the staff.

‘God, you’re so lucky. He used to be my mentor, before they reclassified me to Derek,’ Roger grimaced, and Brian could swear he heard a touch of jealousy in his voice. ‘But I’ll ask for you,’ Roger continued, probably sensing that going up to his mentor to ask him for information that possibly might have been explained to him but which he had immediately after forgotten about again, was going to be neither realistic nor beneficial to Brian’s nerves.

Brian followed Roger’s eyes as they darted around the room in their quest to spot his mentor - and luckily, he soon found him sitting with a handful of nurses and other members of the medical support crew at a table diagonally behind the one they were sitting at - and his voice was loud enough to make himself audible to him without doing as much as walking over to him. ‘Nolan! Nolan, what group is Brian in?’

The person he was reaching out for looked up from the conversation he was having with one of his co-workers to focus on Roger instead. He squinted for a second, but once he looked aside to see a rather insecure looking Brian sitting next to Roger, he suddenly seemed to remember. ‘Oh, I totally forgot to tell him that! How stupid,’ Nolan reproved himself with a bit of an apologetic smile towards the boys he was talking to. ‘He’s in group 3E, with Jasper and Ariel.’

‘Thank you, I’ll tell him,’ Roger promised him, but there was no need for - Brian himself had already eavesdropped on the conversation himself.

‘I already heard, group 3E,’ Brian therefore repeated as to save himself from having to hear the announcement again, and instead focus on something that was more important to him than hearing in which group he was twice. ‘So what is group 3E for?’

‘Depressive disorders, I would guess,’ Freddie told him, turning to Roger for confirmation. ‘Right? Because no other diagnosis apart from depression in here has so many patients that they would need five subgroups for it.’

‘I would think so. Us junkies only have three groups, for that matter,’ Roger chuckled.

‘Me and the other stick figures even less,’ Freddie joined him jokingly, but neither of them managed to pull a smile from Brian now that he was pondering about his classification.

‘But my main diagnosis is borderline,’ Brian brought in with a frown.

‘That’s kind of odd,’ Freddie said, copying the pensive look on Brian’s face. ‘Maybe it was a mista…’

‘They probably just didn’t have a separate group for that and decided to throw you in with the depression sufferers,’ was the explanation Brian received from someone interrupting Freddie mid-sentence. Surprisingly enough, it did not come from Roger, but from John, whose voice contained a touch of irritation, as if he had not wanted to speak up but could stand listening to Freddie making up stories just to comfort Brian for the strange seeming classification even less than talking himself. ‘It happened to more people in 3E,’ John said as an additional explanation, probably just to keep anyone from doubting his conclusion concerning the matter. If this indeed had been his reason for adding that some people were randomly being thrown into a depression talk group when their disorder didn’t match any other specific group, John was rather successful in making the three people he spoke to refrain from speaking; none of them said a word for a few second, and instead looked at each other until they had silently yet collectively decided that this time not Freddie but Roger was going to speak up first.

‘How do you know?’ Roger asked their roommate, who at last had started to clear up his plate. He did not look up at any of the boys surrounding him while shoving his bowl of milk and cereals towards the middle of it and throwing his spoon into the substance with enough force to make milk spill over the edges of the bowl. The irritation that seemingly fuelled the action involuntarily made Brian take a step back.

‘Because that’s my group,’ John answered curtly, which made the other boys exchange a glance between the three of them. Freddie and Roger were mainly concerned with the question of why John hadn’t shared this news a bit earlier, given that they had been going on about talk groups for several minutes by now; Brian, on the other hand, was more than relieved to find that he was not going to have to go to the talk group on his own. Maybe John wasn’t as talkative or protective or even _human_ as his other roommates were, but that was okay - Brian felt like he connected to John on another level than on a social one, on a deeper emotional level which only people who had been dragged down by life to the point of clinical depression and self-mutilation could understand. 

‘You’re also in 3E?’ Freddie was the first to pop the rather rhetorical question all of them still felt should be asked.

‘I sure am,’ John said with a sigh that immediately made Brian want to apologise for bothering him with his presence. Of course, it hadn’t been his idea to have been placed in the same group as John, but whereas the idea of being together with his roommate who partially suffered from the same conditions as he did made him feel relieved, John seemed to be less enthusiastic about sharing a group with him. Brian was unsure if it was because John didn’t like him personally or if he just didn’t like the idea of having to hang around other people in general, but either of the two thoughts made him feel queasy.

‘Darling, why didn’t you tell Brian? If you had, he wouldn’t have had to worry about being alone in there,’ Freddie reproved him in a nearly motherly voice that still did not seem to get through to John on any level.

‘Sorry. Wasn’t listening, I guess,’ John said in a business-like tone, not a hint of actual apology to it.

‘As usual,’ Freddie said with an eye roll to match, before turning to Brian. ‘Well, at least he’ll be physically present. That’s something, I guess.’ He gave Brian the apologetic smile John hadn’t been willing or capable of giving him. Brian hoped for the latter of the two options as he flashed the weakest of a smile back at his roommate, who seemed to notice that he was closer to crying than to smiling at the moment.

‘We should go to our groups now, before we’re too late. Just follow John, he knows where to go and what to do,’ Roger told Brian while scooping one last spoonful of baked beans into his mouth, before picking up his tray from the table. Brian followed his example - of picking up his plate, that was; he felt too nauseous with nerves at the moment to even eat one more piece of his cereals - and spied around to see if the counter was already empty enough to put his tray down on. Unfortunately for him, there was still a multitude of people rushing around the place, making Brian’s reticence towards walking over to the place grow even worse than it already had been.

‘I’ll bring that back for you,’ Roger offered, and Brian smiled in relief as he handed his tray to his roommate - that was at least one thing less to worry about. On the other side, not having to clear up his plate himself did mean that he had to face the reality of having to go to his group session even quicker. But then again - he would have to submit to this fate within now and a few minutes anyway. It would have been nothing else than a stay of execution.

‘You can do it, darling,’ Freddie told him, obviously sensing how Brian felt towards the upcoming activity that he had not been given the time to mentally prepare himself for. He lay an emaciated hand so light on his roommate’s shoulder that Brian could hardly feel the weight of it pressing down on him, making him regret not having told Freddie to please eat some more than those two slices of apple he had consumed during breakfast. ‘We’ll see you in about an hour.’

Brian swallowed painfully and gave a weak nod to his roommates, watching helplessly as they turned around to the counter to drop off their plates, by doing so leaving him behind with a quiet and seemingly irritated John. He had no idea what he should do now, how he should behave around him, what he should say to him, if he should even say anything at all if he did not want to make matters worse than they apparently already were. He could not remember that he had said anything particularly upsetting or irritating to John that morning - he could not remember having said anything at all to the boy, in all honesty.

Still, it was as if he had done something wrong - and it seemed to Brian that the only thing it could have been, was that he had been placed in the same group as John for the upcoming group sessions that people around them continued to gather for. Replaying the conversation of their breakfast over again in his head, it seemed to Brian that John had indeed only started being as cold towards him and the others (instead of his usual indifference) when he had heard that they shared a group. It was then that he had sighed audibly and thrown his plate together with a lot more force than he had been needing for the task; before that, he had even ‘helped’ Brian escape from having to listen to their roommates’ most intimate thoughts and confessions, be it in his own way. It all made sense to Brian that having been placed in the same talk group had been too much for the boy, that this was the event that had given rise to John’s coldness - and he felt guilt sinking in for simply existing.

‘I’m sorry for being in the same group as you,’ Brian whispered to the person standing next to him. ‘I’ll talk to Nolan or those… Jasper and Ariel he mentioned, to ask if they can put me in another-’

‘Why would you be sorry?’ John interrupted him, looking up with greyish eyes that captured Brian for a moment; not because of how dark and ice cold they were this time, but because there was a hint of surprise in them, as if it surprised him to hear that Brian would say such a thing. Though Brian was glad to see that John was capable of experiencing and expressing human reactions like these, his surprise confused him even more at this point; did John mind having to share his group with him, or did he not, against all odds and body language he had been studying?

‘Because you… you didn’t seem to be happy about me being in your group?’ Brian said, his voice raising towards the end of his sentence making his statement sound more like a question.

The surprise in John’s eyes vanished to make place for a more neutral expression. ‘I didn’t sigh because I don’t want to be in this group with you, if that’s what you think,’ John told Brian, making the boy marvel at how all of his roommates seemed to be able to read him like an open book; Freddie was apparently not the only one with Sherlockian superpowers. ‘Being in this group with you is probably the best thing that’s happened to my group sessions so far.’

‘Really?’ was all Brian managed to squeak after having let this confession sink in for a moment. He felt the knot that had formed in his stomach slowly untangling after having heard these words coming from John’s lips. He did not hate him. He did not want to avoid him at all costs. He did not despise being in the same group as him for whatever kind of activity was going to be coming up - on the contrary, he even _liked_ being in the same group as him. He said it was the best thing that had ever happened to him concerning these group sessions - which, coming from the indifferent and depressed John, meant more to Brian than it would have done coming from anyone else.

‘Yeah, I don’t mind being around you. You’re quiet. Thoughtful. Kind of anxious and panicky and the like, but who can blame you?’ John told him, and Brian could feel his cheeks starting to glow. Compliments never really made much of an impression on him, especially not mediocre ones like these. But since they came from John, a depression-inflicted mutual that Brian wanted to impress (or maybe ‘being tolerated by’ was perhaps a better description of what he was aiming for), they meant a lot to Brian and his self-esteem.

‘So, eh… where do we go?’ Brian quickly changed the topic as he demonstratively looked around the open space of the canteen, just to prevent John from seeing the crimson red colour that had crept up his cheeks - even though he was afraid it was so obvious that even someone as indifferent as John had already spotted it.

‘We just stay here in the canteen,’ John told him, then added as an explanation to a confused looking Brian: ‘There are too many groups and too little rooms, so we’re just going to move a few tables and chairs aside and sit in the middle of the canteen.’

‘And all those other people who aren’t leaving? Are they all in… in our group?’ Brian asked, feeling the panic starting to well up again. As quickly as John’s confirmation that he didn’t hate him had made the knot in his stomach disappear, as quickly had it started forming again when Brian looked around the canteen, which easily contained fifty people even now that most patients had moved to wherever their group session was going to take place. Just the thought of all of these people being around while they had to talk about their mental problems…

‘No, there are about twelve people in our group. Those are other groups that don’t have a space for themselves either. The… people with anger issues and the religious fanatics, I guess,’ John told him with the same calm as Freddie and Roger earlier had been explaining things to him. It was as if the boy was capable of opening up if they were between the two of them; both his sudden accessibility and the instance with John showing him his scars went to prove this assumption. Unfortunately, however, the quiet voice of his teammate-to-be was not enough to soothe Brian, who at the moment was not sure if it would be worse to have to speak in front of all these people, or if talking  while all other groups hung around them would make him feel even more anxious.

‘So they’re staying here?’ Brian asked shakily, receiving a nod from John, who either could not see what the problem was, had gotten used to the concept of being here with four groups at the same time, or who simply did not care in the same way as he did not care about most things around here. ‘But I can’t talk while other people are eavesdropping on us!’ Brian whispered.

‘Doesn’t matter. No one in this group talks anyway, at least not voluntarily. You’ll fit right in,’ John told him, leaving Brian unsure if he should be comforted by this idea when he followed his teammate to the place in the middle of the canteen where a dozen of people were waiting for them.


	4. Part Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes and warnings: This part features abuse, (slight) consequential injury, strong language, and homophobia.

‘Everyone please sit down and make yourself comfortable.’

The invitation of the man who was going to lead the upcoming group talk was easier said than done for Brian, who - together with John - came walking towards the part of the canteen that had been chosen as a location for their therapy session just when this announcement was being made. Even if he figured out where he should sit, making himself comfortable was not going to be a realistic goal for this first therapy session with a bunch of strangers with whom he did not even share a diagnose.

Glancing around, Brian found that he was not the only one who did not immediately listen to the order. Out of the twelve people present, only two had sat down; the rest of them were still standing around, leaning against the tables or had simply gotten down on the floor. It looked to Brian as some act of silent protest against the therapy session that was about to start. As if by sitting down on the chair, the group would acknowledge their participation in this event, which they could avoid by sitting on the floor instead. However, when the man whom Brian assumed was the group leader requested that everyone sit down twice more, people started standing up from the floor and sitting down on the plastic canteen chairs that had been placed in a circle for the occasion.

Feeling the urge to follow their actions, Brian coughed softly to catch John’s attention. ‘Where should we sit?’ he whispered softly enough to make sure no one else apart from his addressee would hear the insecurity in his voice.

‘Next to Jimmy,’ John said with a nod towards a boy having positioned himself on a chair across from the instructor, which was something Brian could see the appeal of. Still, sitting next to a stranger was not something he would generally do if not absolutely necessary. Perhaps if John could step in and take this place for him…

‘Do I… sit next to him?’ Brian whispered at him as a subtle hint for John to sit next to the unknown boy, but John shortly shook his head as to indicate this was not going to happen.

Bending closer towards Brian, John told him: ‘Believe me, you’d rather sit next to Jimmy than end up next to Lester or Irvin or someone of their crowd.’

That was something Brian had not thought of yet - if John would sit down in the spot he had reserved for him, Brian would inevitably sit next to someone unfamiliar. He blushed when he realised how stupid it was of him not to think of this obvious consequence, and even more when he realised John was sacrificing himself just to make sure Brian could sit in between people he would feel as comfortable as possible around. Because really, now that he looked at Jimmy, he indeed seemed the least threatening person of the group Brian had been tossed into; he looked innocent, even, with his big brown eyes, blond hair, and soft, round cheeks. He seemed young, very young to Brian - if he hadn’t known that Queen Mary’s did not take in anyone under the age of eighteen, he would have thought Jimmy was younger than that.

Deciding that there was nothing to fear for when sitting next to this boy, Brian followed John’s instruction and sat down on the chair next to the person he had been assigned to sit beside. Once he had positioned himself in between John and this Jimmy, he was unsure if he should make contact with him; should he say hi to him, introduce himself, smile at him, or at the very least look at him to acknowledge the presence of the person sitting next to him?

Before Brian could come to a conclusion in terms to what to do, the boy already turned at him and flashed him a weak but sincere smile.

‘You must be new here,’ the boy said, reaching a chubby hand out in his direction. ‘I’m Jimmy Elliot.’

‘Brian May,’ he said in return, but just as he was about to place his hand on Jimmy’s, Brian felt his body freeze. Just below the hand reached out to him, the wrist had been tied off with a thick layer of white bandage, preventing him from seeing whatever kind of horror had been going on beneath. Brian swallowed thickly and attempted to take the hand he was being offered, but he found himself incapable to move, afraid he would hurt his fellow group mate if he would do as much as touch him. No matter how hard he tried to pull himself together, all he could do was keep his eyes focussed on the tape around Jimmy’s wrist, wondering how he had done it and how he had survived.

He knew for a fact that Jimmy had caught him in the act of staring, because the boy said to him: ‘Precaution measure. Nothing to worry about.’

Brian knew he was lying. He had engaged in self-harm himself, and he knew that a piece of bandage around your skin would not prevent you from simply ripping it off and digging a shaving razor into your wrist. Still, in order not to complicate things upon their first meeting - and more than that, not wanting to interfere in other people’s business - he nodded as if the answer was as a comfort to him.

The opposite was true.

Still, Brian managed to take the hand Jimmy was still holding out to him in his own, hoping Jimmy did not notice the clamminess of his palm in the few seconds they shook hands before the sound of the group leader speaking up made them break apart.

 _Well,_ Brian thought dimly to himself when he pulled his hand back and wiped the sweat of his palm on the fabric of his shirt _, at least I know what **he** is here for._

‘Alright, time to start,’ the man said, clapping his hands twice to catch the attention of his group, which made a dull yet way too loud sound for Brian’s liking. ‘My name is Jasper and this is Ariel,’ he said, pointing at a young woman who had suddenly appeared next to him. ‘You can probably guess why we’re reintroducing ourselves.’

‘Because a new victim has been added to our group,’ one of the participants muttered, which earned him a few mildly amused snickers but a warning glance from the group leader. _Not that he seemed to mind,_ Brian thought as he studied the boy with unkempt, black hair who had slumped down on one of the chairs and definitely did not seem to care about his use of language.

‘A new _member_ , thank you very much, Joshua,’ Jasper corrected him. Brian, on the other hand, found himself agreeing with Joshua’s definition of his status within the group more than with that of Jasper, especially when the latter immediately dragged him out of his comfort zone by encouraging him to introduce himself.

‘As usual, I would like to give him an opportunity to get to know all of us, and for us to get to know him. So Brian, why don’t you get up and introduce yourself?’

Brian felt his heart skip a beat and his entire body tense up the moment he heard this. Within less than a second, thirteen pairs of eyes seemed to have turned to him, waiting for him to stand up and deliver a speech on his life, medical past, diagnose, or whatever they were expecting from him. Even more than a moment ago, when Jimmy had reached a hand wrapped up in bandage for obvious reasons towards him, Brian felt like he was incapable of moving, talking, or even breathing, and instead could do nothing than giving their group leader a helpless look. Unfortunately for him, Jasper did not seem to understand his unspoken language, or he simply chose to ignore him.

‘Well?’ Jasper said in a way that Brian knew deep down inside was meant to be encouraging, but all it really did for him was putting him under even more pressure than he already had been.

‘You mean literally… eh, literally get up?’ Brian asked once he had cleared his suddenly incredibly dry threat, and he could swear he could hear one of the people around him sigh in what seemed to be annoyance. He felt his cheeks starting to burn in shame and frustration - he really did not want to do this, he really wished he could be somewhere else right now, _anywhere_ else but here, with all these eyes fixed on him and waiting for him to say something to probably embarrass himself.

‘Yes, why not?’ Jasper asked as if he could not see the terrified look in Brian’s eyes. He therefore  gave a look at John, who gave him a bit of an insisting nod of which Brian was not sure if it was meant to be encouraging, or if he was just telling him to stop his whining and get the hell on. Either way, after this one gesture John seemed to sink back into his state of emotionlessness again; staring at a random spot on the floor like he did to the ceiling in their room, Brian knew he could not count on John at this particular point in time. He realised that whatever he would do now would be nothing but a stay of execution, so he shakily got up from his chair, keeping his eyes down when he rose above the rest of the crowd.

However, when he listened to the order of getting up, he suddenly realised he had not thought about how he should introduce himself. Finding himself at a loss of ideas, he turned to the mentors of the group and quietly asked: ‘What do I have to say?’ The chuckles this comment received him was something he tried to push away, even though he knew they would come to haunt him later that evening no matter how much he told himself he should not care about them.

‘Your name, age, where you’re from, why you’re here, for a start,’ Ariel suggested, which Brian decided he could work with.

‘Well, I’m Brian, I’m twenty-three, and I’m from London. And I’m here because I have a depression,’ Brian summed up. He looked around the circle of people to find some of them gazing at him, while others were either engaged with whispering to each other or staring into the void like both the people sitting next to him seemed to have done. He wasn’t sure if it was a good or a bad sign that no one apart from the mentors really seemed to pay attention to him; of course he did not want to be the main point of focus, but did people’s distraction mean he was boring? That they didn’t accept him as one of them? That they hated him before he had even had the chance to say his name?

Just when he had convinced himself that people must think he was at the very least boring and therefore intended to sit down again before they would start being annoyed by his appearance, Jasper prevented him from doing so by saying something that had Brian frozen for a moment.

‘Is that the main reason you’re here? I believe you have a different main diagnosis, don’t you?’

Brian chewed on his lower lip when Jasper brought up exactly what he had been hoping he could be hiding from the rest of the people. He knew he did not exactly conform to the diagnosis of the people he had been placed with, but he had been hopeful that he could pretend to just suffer from depression and not have to elaborate on the real reason he was here. Unfortunately, the therapy leader had shattered his hopes of being normal with one single sentence that made most of the men around Brian look into his direction.

‘Yeah, but that’s… not very important or interesting,’ Brian quickly blurted out, even though he could already sense that Jasper was not going to agree with this particular answer to his question.

‘Why not?’ the therapy leader asked indeed.

‘It’s rather complicated,’ Brian tried to brush him off, but it seemed to him that this evasive answer only seemed to spark more interest in the people around him, who by now of course expected a psychoanalytic explanation of the functioning of his brain at the very least.

‘You could explain it,’ Ariel encouraged him. If the smile she offered him had not been so kind and if there would not have been twelve other people sitting around the pair of them, Brian would seriously have considered telling her to stick to her own business.

‘But I don’t think I…’ Brian started, but he was not even given a chance to finish his sentence.

‘Openness is key to recovery, Brian,’ Jasper told him sternly, almost sounding as if he was reproving him for not being excited about sharing his medical data with the entire group. For trying to protect the little amount of privacy he had left, and it seemed like he was not even allowed to hold onto this.

‘Alright then,’ Brian said, failing to completely oppress a sigh when he gave in. ‘I have borderline.’ The last few people who had not been paying attention to him seemed to have turned to him when they heard this obviously unknown word, which begged for an explanation Brian wished he would not have to give.

‘Can you go deeper into that?’ Jasper asked, and Brian, understanding that ‘no’ was not the desired answer to this question, nodded involuntarily.

‘It’s a… you can describe it as an emotional regulation disorder,’ Brian managed, feeling his cheeks starting to glow more and more now that everyone seemed to be looking at him. He felt his mouth suddenly having fallen as dry as the Sahara desert, making swallowing hard and clearing his throat even harder.

‘Yes?’ Ariel said with a smile, and Brian, fumbling with the hem of his shirt, struggled for a general explanation that would not give his peers the impression he was a complete maniac. The one he had given to his roommates the day before seemed to have escaped him completely, so he fumbled to come up with a new way that would explain his mental illness while glossing over the edges of it as much as possible.

‘Well, so it’s an emotional regulation disorder, meaning that I have a lot of mood swings I can’t control. I can be having a great day and then something small can throw me off all at once, or I suddenly get angry over nothing,’ Brian explained, not daring to look around himself to see if his story made sense to people. ‘I struggle with insecurity a lot, I have a hard time making decisions, and being in touch with other people. It also often goes together with depression, which is why I’m in this group,’ Brian added to satisfy the sudden urge to explain his presence to the group, which by now was listening to him in a silence Brian felt like breaking by screaming if it was going to last a few seconds longer.

The silence was eventually broken before Brian could carry out this plan, be it not entirely in the way he had hoped for it to happen.

‘Never heard of it,’ one of the people around him told him, and Brian was quick to identify the speaker as a young man sitting a few spots to his right, who was slumping in his seat and flashed him a look of utter boredom. ‘Sure you’re not making it up right here at the spot?’

Before, Brian would have thought it was impossible to blush even more than he already had been doing, but his body proved him wrong. While half of the group joined in on the chuckling of the person who had made the comment, Brian brought up a hand to feel at his left cheek, only to discover it felt like it was on fire. He wished he could storm out of this group, out of this improvised therapy room, these overenthusiastic leaders and disinterested fellow patients, to go anywhere else than the place he was at now. But, feeling like he had been nailed to the floor below his feet, Brian found himself stuck in the middle of the circle, and fumbled for an answer to shut whoever this guy was up with.

‘It’s a rather new diagnosis. It’s not even officially out yet, which is probably why you’ve never heard of it…’ Brian explained to what turned out to be no one in particular; the boy he had been addressing had already turned to his neighbour again, and the rest of the dozen of people around him was just kind of glancing in his general direction, possibly listening, possibly wondering when the hell he would shut up and sit own again. Given that this was exactly what Brian himself wanted to do also, he turned to the two therapists and asked: ‘Can I sit down again?’

‘I’m sure that there’s more to you than simply your name, age, and diagnosis,’ Jasper told him, immediately shattering the remainders of Brian’s hope that he could simply slip away from the spotlights without making himself look like a complete fool - especially when this call-out moment seemed to catch the attention of all people around him. ‘What did you do before you got here?’

 _Cutting myself with a razor blade when the rest of the house was asleep,_ Brian thought dimly, but decided that he did not want to share this information with the lot of them. ‘I studied,’ Brian revealed carefully. ‘At university,’ he added when he saw Jasper looking expectantly at him, as if he anticipated something more than simply a phrase consisting of a subject and a verb. He immediately felt bad about it afterwards, however; the looks the people around him shared between each other was all he needed to know that they would probably think of him as a nerd, an overachiever who consequently had fallen down, and the follow-up question Ariel asked him didn’t make it any better.

‘What did you study there?’

‘Astrophysics.’

‘How interesting,’ Jasper said, and if it had been anyone else but his overly interested (nosy, rather) group leader, Brian would have feared it had not been sincere interest but bitter sarcasm. ‘Why did you choose that particular subject?’

‘Because I was… interested in the universe as a whole, and all of its phenomena and everything that was yet to be discovered about it…’ Brian said in an attempt to explain himself, but soon guessed by the glances people kept sending each other that he was doing it all wrong. God, what would people around him think about him, hearing all of this stilted nonsense? ‘But it turned out not to be as interesting as I thought it was gonna be in the end, so I dropped out,’ Brian hastily added. He preferred lying and keeping up what remained of whatever positive image his team mates would still retain of him, instead of admitting that he had dropped out because his mental illnesses had made it impossible to move on, and so secure his reputation as a nerd.

Now that Brian had cut off all ties to school, he was hoping he would finally be released from his cross examination. Unfortunately for him, after a few seconds of tense silence, Jasper came up with another question he did not feel like answering.

‘Do you have any hobbies?’

 _Does lying in bed staring at a wall count? Or getting away from social confrontations like these?_ Brian found it harder and harder to keep the voices in his head from adding sarcastic yet painfully accurate comments to everything people around him asked him, but he managed to push them away and give a normal answer to the question.

‘I play guitar,’ Brian admitted stiffly. This answer seemed to spark a bit of short-lived interest in some of his team mates, but most of all, it was Jasper who he was pleasing by giving this reply, since this gave the group leader something new to tie in on.

‘Really?’ Jasper asked, almost sounding as if he had never imagined his newest pupil to do anything interesting in his life. ‘What kind of genre do you play?’

‘Just some pop and rock music. Jimi Hendrix, Cream, or the Beatles, or… whatever comes up on the radio,’ Brian quickly corrected himself when he noticed a few vague facial expressions around him that made him want to slap his own forehead when he realised his team mates were probably looking that way because he was enumerating some bands that had gone out of fashion already. They obviously thought him to be out-dated for listening to bands that had already disbanded and artists that had passed away, making Brian want to vanish into thin air. ‘Can we move on?’ he attempted again while looking at the group leaders. ‘We must have more to talk about than my hob-’

‘And so you also own a guitar of your own, I assume?’ Jasper interrupted him halfway through his sentence, for some reason not allowing Brian to back out of this unwanted conversation - cross examination, more like. Brian sighed heavily before he begrudgingly replied.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Do you have it with you?’ Jasper asked, and for the first time since his arrival, Brian was happy that he had not been allowed to take it with him. If he had, he was sure Jasper would have encouraged him to play something right here in the middle of the therapy session, and that was just about the _last_ thing Brian was looking forward to.

‘I wanted to, but I wasn’t allowed to,’ Brian told him with ill-hidden relief.

‘That’s a shame,’ Jasper answered, sounding more sorry for the fact that Brian had been made to leave his precious instrument at home than the owner of the object itself. ‘What kind of guitar do you own?’

In his relief he would not be made to play guitar in front of his therapy group and embarrass himself even more, the question had caught Brian off guard for a moment. What exactly did Jasper mean with this question? What kind of material it was made of, what kind of neck it had, what brand it was, or what type it was - classical, acoustic, or electric?

Getting tangled up in all these questions in his head, Brian found himself asking: ‘What do you mean by ‘kind’?’

Some men around Brian squinted as if they wondered how many different ‘kinds’ one could possibly mean when talking of guitars, but Jasper sounded nice enough when he answered ‘I meant which brand it is.’

Well, that was exactly the ‘kind’ Brian had not been hoping for, given that this was a question he could not really give a sensible answer to. ‘It eh, doesn’t really have a brand. My father and me made it ourselves,’ he admitted, suddenly not knowing if he had to be proud or ashamed of the fact that his father and he had crafted a guitar on their own. Either people would think of it as very ingenious, or they would think he came from a cheapskate family that refused to spend a dime on anything they could make themselves - and, judging the general public in this place, he was guessing that it was going to be the latter option.

‘You made it yourselves?’ Ariel asked, seeming to be impressed - and, simultaneously, seeming to be the only one Brian had managed to impress so far.

‘Yeah, from like... leftover wood from the fireplace,’ Brian said, before he decided that this must have made him sound even more stupid just there, wishing he could vanish into thin air - or, at the very least, be excused from talking. Judging that this second option was probably going to be more plausible than the first, he turned to the team leaders once again and nearly begged: ‘Can I _please_ sit down again?’. He heard in his own voice how desperate he sounded, but Lord, he hated being put in the spotlights, he hated the way these people made him reveal details about his life he did not want to share with anyone in here, he hated himself for his awkwardness around strangers, and most of all, he hated this entire place and all people inside of it.

In the silence that followed Brian’s desperate request, it seemed like all people surrounding him stared at him; but most of all, Jasper gave him a long and intense stare that somehow managed to make Brian feel even more uncomfortable than he already had been. Tilting his head to the side a bit, Jasper eventually broke the silence by asking him calmly, as if he was used to cross examining people to the extent where they would break down: ‘What is it? What is the problem you feel you’re facing most right now?’

‘I just… don’t like being interrogated and all,’ Brian said quietly, staring down at his shoes while he did so. He could not face his leader or anyone, really, at this point, especially when even this answer did not seem to be enough to make people back off for just a second to let him breathe.

‘What makes you feel like you’re being interrogated at the moment?’ Jasper asked, making Brian wonder if he was testing him, or if he really was that stupid. Did Jasper really not see how uncomfortable he was making him by letting him stand up and answer an ocean of questions about his personal life among a group of people he had never seen before? Could he really not see that one of the main _reasons_ Brian was here was because human contact frightened him, and that this ‘exposure therapy’ Jasper was submitting him to on the very first day of therapy was not going to solve anything, but rather made him even less willing to engage with other people?

Brian was torn between attempting to offer an explanation of exactly why he hated confrontations like this, but he found himself unable to speak. He felt like he had been nailed to the floor below, like his tongue had been stabled to his teeth, like his brain had gone blank. Jasper looked at him, obviously awaiting a reaction that did not come - at least, not in the shape he had hoped for.

‘I’m… Sorry, I’ll just- I’ll be right back,’ Brian found himself blurting out before he could even realise what he was about to say - and, once he had said it, he knew he had no choice but to do as he said. Turning around in his spot, he shoved the chair he previously had been sitting on aside as to create an entrance for him to escape through. The chair clattered on the floor below when he stepped away from the circle, but he did not allow the noise of it to catch him off guard; instead, he walked, walked faster, until he eventually found himself running to the exit of the room. He heard someone calling out his name - first as a question, but soon after as an exclamation. Someone shouted they should follow him, which sounded to Brian as if they were instructing a police officer to run after a pickpocket and which might have made him mile another time another place, if he had not been close to tears in his attempt to leave the group, the therapy session, and the entire canteen behind.

Once he had made it into the hallway, he could still hear voices calling out to him and footsteps following him, the combination of which made him curse under his breath. He needed to be alone for a moment, somewhere no one else would find him. The only problem was that he had no idea where on earth to find a private place in this labyrinth of hallways and doors leading to unknown rooms - Lord, he hardly knew whether he should go left or right to move into the directions of the dorm rooms. All he knew right now was that he needed to go somewhere he could be alone before whoever on earth was running after him would find him.

Not allowing himself to focus for a moment where he was out of fear of being caught and dragged back to the canteen, Brian thoughtlessly ran to the right at the end of the hallway that had led him to the canteen. It was empty altogether, and the quietness made him hear the shouting of his name and the handful of footsteps tapping against the floor (God, how many people had come to follow him?) all the more. He turned right again in an attempt to shake them off, but he soon found out that this had been a bad choice; all he could see was a straight hallway stretching before him, with at the end of it two wardens guarding a back entrance of the building he so far had not known the existence of. There was no way he could turn back without running right into the group of people chasing him, and running through the exit ahead of him also seemed unrealistic while two staff members were guarding it. Still, as he was out of other options, ran towards the exit; perhaps the wardens could help him make the therapy group back off, and maybe, just maybe, he could catch them off guard by his speed and slip through the doors and into freedom…

However, when he saw the two men in front of him jumping into action at his speedy approach and call out to him to ask what on earth he thought he was doing (which, in all honesty, was a question Brian himself would also like to know the answer of), he knew he should fear the wardens rather than trust them to help him. He now literally found him stuck in between two groups of people trying to chase him from either side of him, and the only way of temporarily escape he could focus on now, was trying to find if one of the doors at either side of the wall would grant him access.

In his state of blind panic, Brian could hardly see the signs of the rooms, most of which proudly boasted ‘staff room’, and which he knew he could not open without a key. He gave a weak attempt trying to push one of the doors open, emitting a helpless ‘let me in!’, before his eye caught the room right next to the one he was trying to invade at the moment. He could not see a title, but the blue sign was enough to tell him that it was a bathroom. Perhaps it was a staff bathroom, but that was not something he cared about right now; the room was unlocked, unoccupied, and was a perfect place of refuge for him right now.

Brian sprinted towards it and pushed the door open with more force than necessary, after which he was quick to press it close behind him right in time before the multitude he was trying to avoid had reached the room. He could see the door handle moving up and down in their attempt to open the door, felt their hands pushing at the wooden surface of it to gain access, but they did not stand a chance when Brian kept the door close by leaning against it with all of his weight and all of his might.

His chest was still heaving, he could feel a drop of sweat moving down his temple, but Brian knew he had managed to reach his goal. He had escaped direct confrontation with the people chasing after him, and even though they were still pounding on the door like a bunch of maniacs, he did not have to face them, did not have to talk to them, did not have to give in and return to that dreadful cross examination with them. Whatever was to happen after this, was something he preferred not to know about yet. Of course, he knew he could not lock himself inside the staff bathroom for the entirety of his stay at Queen Mary’s, but perhaps he could stay inside this place for long enough to made the people at the other side of the door back off and go back to the canteen to pick up their interrupted group therapy session again, and leave him on his own to give him a second to breathe.

Right now, however, they seemed to be far away from this desired moment of peace and quiet, for the knocking at the door, the calling of his name, and the sincere sounding yet not accepted apologies kept coming at him.

‘Brian? Brian, won’t you please come out and talk to us?’ a female voice called out, one Brian knew could only be Ariel.

‘I’m sorry for having pushed you into the spotlights,’ a male voice followed, which Brian guessed had to be Jasper. ‘I apologise for that and won’t do it again, okay?’ Brian could hear in his voice that Jasper probably meant it, but he did not feel like he could trust him yet, let alone open the door for him. After all, he had made it pretty clear multiple times that he did not want to get up and talk to the entire group, and Jasper had ignored all of those instances. Why would he suddenly listen to Brian now?

‘Will you at least talk to us?’ An unknown voice asked him while vehemently rattling the door handle, something that made Brian even more unwilling to answer to the request. The pleads and knocks on the door kept spilling for what felt like an eternity, until Brian eventually could not keep up with the self-imposed silence and felt like calling out to the crew.

‘Leave me alone,’ Brian said to the invisible people at the other side of the room, before he decided that this perhaps sounded a bit too rude and tried to make up for this by adding a softer: ‘Please. I need to be alone for a moment.’

Silence for a moment, before the voice of Jasper told him: ‘You can’t just keep walking away from your problems, Brian. That’s exactly what we’re trying to teach you in this therapy, and why you should come out and talk to us.’

 _This man really does not understand or even listen to a word of what anyone tells him,_ Brian thought to himself when Jasper continued raging about why it was so important for him to talk to people and how this would help curing his depression and borderline. Especially the latter assertion Brian found to be funny, given that borderline was not even an official diagnosis yet, let alone that psychiatrist had established a solid cure for it yet.

In an attempt to distract himself from the lecture he was being given by the group leader, Brian allowed himself to glance around the room he had locked himself up in. At his right side were three toilet cells in a row, and to his left an equal number of washing stands. They looked a bit more modern than the ones belonging to the dorm rooms of the patients, and the hand dryer hanging on the wall in front of Brian certainly was a luxury that was not available in their bathrooms, where paper towels were blocking the drains of the sinks, and where you could not hang up your clothes or towels because there were no hooks in the shower cabins, with the result of them being stolen by some fellow patients thinking they were being funny.

When Brian allowed himself to listen to how far Jasper was with his preaching, he noticed that he had fallen quiet against all odds. Instead, all he heard now were footsteps approaching and a voice asking if they had found him, and Brian found himself sighing deeply. There already seemed to be at least four people banging on the other side of the door, and the last thing he was looking forwards to, was yet someone _else_ to come up and bother him.

However, much to his surprise, it seemed that whoever it was that had come up now, was the first person not trying to convince him to come out but to actually be on his side.

‘Guys, he just ran out because everyone was interfering with him. Do you really think that banging on the door of the room he locked himself up in will make him feel like joining us again?’

Now that he could hear the voice from closely, Brian suddenly realised that it was not just any other person; he had heard this voice before. For a moment he could not place it, but then it suddenly downed on him that the sound of it, including the touch of boredom and sarcasm when he spoke in disagreement of someone, could belong to no one else than his room- ánd team mate, John.

Brian could hardly hear what the group said in reply to him; he was too baffled by the knowledge that John had come out here, found his way through the labyrinth of hallways to find the place he had locked himself up in, to help him out in what turned out to be a battle between the therapy group leaders and himself. John, who so far had seemed so absent and detached from the present, had been the last one Brian would have expected to get up and interfere in the entire matter. The fact that he had, whether it was or the sake of Brian or for the sake of putting a halt to this nonsense and get back to the therapy session no one was particularly excited about, was something that did not really matter to Brian. Just knowing that his roommate had shown up here and showed initiative, was enough for Brian to know that John was not, as he sometimes appeared, completely oblivious and indifferent to what was going down in this place.

‘What do you suggest we do then?’ a soft voice asked the person who had just arrived.

‘I suggest the lot of you step back and let me do this, okay?’ John proposed, but not everyone seemed content with this idea.

‘Why do you think you could do this better than any of us?’ someone sneered, but John remained cool, calm, and collected as always.

‘Because I didn’t chase after him to pound on the door like a bloody maniac,’ John said in a way that was so passive aggressive that it made Brian chuckle involuntarily. He had not known John for longer than approximately twenty-four hours, but still, reacting like this seemed so typically John.

‘We did not mean to-’ Ariel tried to defend their actions, but John brushed it off.

‘It doesn’t matter. Just let me do this, okay?’ he said, and judging by the footsteps Brian heard, he assumed the crew did as John said. It was somewhat typical that they did listen to the person who had most recently joined them while they had been refusing to back off when Brian had made it all too clear he did not want to engage with them on any level right now, but he decided that he should not think about this too long and instead be glad everyone was finally backing off.

‘Brian? It’s me, John,’ his roommate said while lightly knocking on the door, which formed a huge contrast to the way people had previously been pounding against it. ‘Do you want to talk to me?’

Brian nodded softly, before he realised that this of course could not be seen through the wooden door that separated them from each other. ‘Yes,’ he told him softly, but he was quick to add: ‘But to you only.’

‘Of course,’ John said, carefully pushing the door handle down. ‘Can I come in? That way we’ll have more privacy than if we have to keep shouting at each other through this door.’

Knowing that John was right, Brian brushed off the last of his tears with the back of his hand and hoped it did not show too much he had been crying, before he took a step back from the door and allowed his roommate to enter the space. John stepped inside the bathroom and swiftly closed the door behind him, as if he was just as desperate to keep the others outside of their personal space as Brian was himself.

‘Well then,’ John said as he took over Brian’s task of leaning against the door just in case anyone outside felt tempted to join them. ‘Nice escape you made just there.’

Brian felt himself started to blush at just the reminder of what he had done, but the smile tugging at the corners of John’s lips told him that John at least did not think of him as an idiot for having ran out of the therapy session. Still, in all honesty, Brian felt like one, and could not help expressing those feelings to John.

‘It did not feel that nice, to be honest,’ Brian mumbled in reply.

‘I can imagine. You really seemed very uncomfortable out there. It was mean of Jasper and Ariel to put you out there when it was pretty clear you didn’t want to be,’ John said, and Brian nodded slightly. It surprised him that John had noticed his restraint; he had not particularly seemed to have been engaged with anything that had been going on in the session. But then again, John showing up here to talk to him already proved that he did pay attention and that he did care to some extent, so perhaps it should not surprise Brian that much.

‘Did they really not see that, or did they just choose not to see it?’ Brian asked John, hoping he could give him the answers Jasper and Ariel themselves had raised in him.

‘I think they must have seen it. They’re great therapists, really. They are kind, they want to do everything they can to help you, they are passionate about their profession…’ John enumerated. ‘But sometimes that’s exactly the problem. They’re so passionate about this whole therapy, while the lot of us just wanna get out of there. Quite literally,’ John snickered, which made Brian blush again. ‘Either way, they’re very passionate about helping people, but they’re stuck with a bunch of brainless zombies like me. So whenever they see someone new, like you, they seize the opportunity and welcome them as if they’re Santa Claus.’

‘I see,’ Brian said, chewing on the inside of his cheek. He still felt pretty ashamed of having run out of the canteen half in tears, but hearing that this was apparently the way the group leaders handled new pupils as a result of their ambitiousness and passion towards their job, made him feel a little better. At least they had not been pushing him to the edge just to test him, to see how far they could push him before he would break.

‘I know it’s unfortunate, but they did this to all of us. Don’t take it personally.’

Brian nodded softly at John, but his mind was elsewhere. Hearing that being put into a cross examination made him wonder how John had felt when he had first joined the therapy group, when Jasper and Ariel had submitted him to similar questioning. The image of John, indifference and annoyance growing with every question they fired at him while the team leaders helplessly tried to start a conversation with him, was something he could not keep his mind from wandering off to. Brian only noticed he had started smiling as a result of the picture he was painting in his head when John pointed it out to him.

‘Did I miss something?’ John asked him, making Brian cough behind his hand in an awkward attempt to cut the smile off his face.

‘Nothing. I just thought of what it must look like to have Jasper and Ariel going after people who just wanna be left alone,’ Brian said, which was not even a lie - because surely, John was one of those people who simply wished for the therapists to back off and mind their own business.

‘Prepare to see plenty of that in the upcoming sessions,’ John sighed. ‘Speaking of which, we should move on. Take a sip of water, wash your face or whatever makes you feel better, then we’ll get back to the canteen.’

‘What… Get back?’ Brian asked with shock audible in his voice, because this was not something he had been ready for to hear, let alone carry out. John, on the other hand, seemed to think of it as nothing but logical.

‘Were you planning on staying here for the entire morning?’ John asked him, cocking one eyebrow at him. Brian weakly shook his head, awkwardly toying with the hem of his shirt.

‘No, but I just… Do I have to go back now? Can’t I just…’ the one lifted eyebrow was still directed at him, suddenly making Brian feel utterly self-conscious about wanting to sneak away from the session altogether and not return - at any rate not for today, preferably not at all.

‘Just not return? I mean in theory you could,’ John shrugged, ‘but I would not advice it. They keep very close track on whether everyone shows up at activities, and if you don’t, you’re guaranteed to have to talk to somebody about it. And let me tell you, that’s even worse than simply attending these dumb therapy groups,’ John told him. Brian wondered what could possibly be worse than being dragged back to the dreaded therapy session, but then he imagined having to lay his soul bare one-to-one instead of being able to hide from confrontation by being one in twelve participants of a group, and he suddenly understood what John meant.

‘You’re probably right,’ Brian said, not facing John when he walked past him to take a sip of water from the tap. He did not dare glance into the mirror out of fear of looking absolutely horrid, so he was quick to turn on the tap, dive down, and take a few sips of the ice cold tap water. It tasted weird, somewhat like iron or some other kind of metal, and found himself hoping he would catch lead poisoning and be allowed to get out of this place.

He wiped the remaining drops of water off his lips with the sleeve of his shirt, and while doing so, accidentally caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. In all honesty he did not look as bad as he had expected himself to do; the skin around his yes was only slightly red, meaning there would be hardly any indication he had been crying for the rest of the team when he would have to return in just a minute or so. They had probably already noticed by the tears spilling from his eyes just before he had turned around and left the canteen, but still, he could try to keep appearances (and, with that, whatever remained of his reputation) up, right?

John appeared next to him in the mirror, rearranging a lock of his long, brown hair while he spoke to Brian without facing him. ‘Brian, I know it’s not ideal, and I’d also rather jump off a bridge than follow that stupid therapy group every day. But I’m just trying to protect you from worse, okay?’ John let him know. His voice was still flat and business-like, but the fact that he tried rearranging and even protecting him, made Brian feel warm inside in a strange kind of manner he could not place.

‘Thank you,’ he said stiffly, not knowing how else he should react to this unexpected hint of care from John’s side.

‘Look, this place is built around rules concerning how to behave, what to do, when to show up at what place… No one feels like following those, but the only way to move upwards in this place - and preferably _out_ of this place, thank you very much - is by adhering to them. So please, do yourself a favour and show up at mealtime, be nice to your mentor and psychiatrist and God knows who more you’ll have to deal with, take your medicines on time, perhaps even volunteer to fold the laundry sometimes… The more you behave in accordance to the rules, the more they’ll leave you alone,’ John told him, and Brian could do nothing but nod at the information John gave him. It all sounded very logical. Of course no one would go to those stupid therapy sessions if they did not have to, but not going probably had some reprimands tied to it as a consequence.

Brian did not really want to, but he just had to ask it. ‘So what happens if you don’t follow the rules?’

‘Well, they prefer positive consequences rather than negative consequences. Part of the idea behind this entire therapy-based approach on mental illness, you see,’ John said while leaning in closer to the mirror and take a look at his face at a closer angle. ‘But if you don’t behave, they will send people over to talk to you, they won’t let you go outside, won’t allow you to write or receive letters, go to sport or game activities at night… Terrible, isn’t it?’ John said, but Brian could see by the grin on his face that he thought the opposite.

‘Sounds like a nightmare,’ Brian said in reply. Still, he found himself wondering why, if this was approach indeed was the case, the people in here simply did not misbehave on purpose. After all, most people afflicted with depression and similar issues Brian knew, preferred being left alone and not having to deal with other people. So why not just misbehave so you didn’t have to turn up to additional social activities and the like?

The answer to why people then still obeyed to the rules followed as soon as John picked up his speech again. ‘But ultimately, they won’t let you get away from this place if you don’t do what’s expected of you. That’s why everyone just does as they’re told most of the time - and, while you’re at it, you might even earn yourself some privileges.’

That was a word Brian had not heard around this place before. ‘Privileges?’

‘No one told you yet?’ John said, and without awaiting a response, he went on to explain: ‘If you show up to all activities, don’t get notes on bad behaviour, and preferably do volunteer work, they’ll allow you some freedom. You can go outside, have visitors over, and even order things - chocolate, chewing gum, books, games, records… Things to kill time with while you’re in here.’

For a moment Brian was interested in the idea of this, but as soon as he remembered that his guitar had been banned on the grounds of ‘causing noise and chaos’ and that he was not to be in touch with anyone during his stay here on the order of his former psychiatrist, his excitement ebbed away again just as soon as it had arrived.

‘That would be nice,’ Brian managed as excited as he was capable, which wasn’t much at the moment. John luckily did not seem to notice his reservation, and even if he had, a knock on the door prevented him from sharing it.

‘Guys? Jimmy here. Are you almost ready to come out again, or…’ Their teammate did not quite finish his sentence, as if he was nervous enough just interrupting their moment of privacy, let alone give an entire description of all possibilities they could choose from instead of joining the therapy group again.

Brian and John turned to look at each other - the both of them had already forgotten about the presence of their teammates- and leaders at the other side of the door, and it took a second before John eventually was the first to react.

‘We’ll be right over!’ he shouted loudly enough for the people in the hallway to hear, before he said softly, so that only Brian could hear him: ‘We should go. Show them you’re stronger than they think.’

Even though Brian did not feel like this at all, he still nodded, drawn to whatever John - who he felt like he could trust more than his own instinct at the moment - told him to do.

‘I’ll tell them to back off for the rest of the session,’ John promised while he opened the door they had kept close for a long time, and Brian followed him, leaving behind the safety of the bathroom he had resorted to and joining their team again.

Even though John had promised it so bravely, it turned out that there was no need for him to tell Jasper or Ariel that they should leave Brian alone for the remainder of the session. Once they walked up to the group waiting on them in the hallway - consisting of Jasper, Ariel, Jimmy, and two other guys of Brian had not heard the name yet - the group leaders were already all apologies and promised him they wouldn’t put them out there again without even needing John to tell them so.

They walked back to the canteen as a group, and though Brian kept his head hanging, not daring to face anyone right away the moment they stepped back into the circle of chairs again, he was relieved to find that no one was taunting him for having ran off previously. No one seemed to be paying special attention to him; the people who had been left behind either did not notice or did not care about the return of the seven of them, and Jasper and Ariel had a hard time trying to direct everyone back into their place and pick up where they’d left about ten minutes ago. Only when everyone had sat down again, they noticed that two previously occupied chairs were now empty, and one person drily mentioned to Ariel that two guys called Lester and Simon - whoever that might have been - had left the place as soon as the leaders had ran after Brian, seeing Brian’s leaving as a way to escape themselves. This information made some people laugh and made other people feel stupid for not having left themselves while Jasper noted the both of them as absent and told the group there would be consequences for this kind of behaviour, something Brian noticed no one seemed to take particularly serious.

‘Very well, let’s start off where we left it,’ Jasper called out, clapping his hands to make sure everyone would be paying attention to him. ‘Brian just told us his story,’ he said, flashing a somewhat apologetic glance to a blushing Brian, ‘and I think it would be nice if the rest of you would also introduce yourselves to our newest group member, don’t you think?’

‘Not particularly,’ Joshua said as he slumped down on his chair a little more than he had already done before, earning a few snorts and chuckles and once again a disapproving glance from Jasper.

‘I think it’s a good idea,’ Ariel backed up the plan of her co-worker, probably fearing that if she didn’t, no one was going to do it. ‘Jimmy, would you like to start?’ she asked the person sitting next to Brian, who exchanged a quick glance with Brian, before he carefully propped himself up on his hands (making Brian fear for the cuts or wounds or whatever was underneath the layers of bandage distracting his wrists from sight) and started talking.

Not everyone stuck to Brian; of half of the people he instantly forgot the name the moment someone else was given the turn to speak. All of the introduction speeches seemed to follow the same pattern; they started with name, then age, where they came from, their diagnosis (which was hardly surprising anymore when the fifth person in row said they were here for their depression), and hobbies. The only people that stayed with him - the only ones he could remember the name of, that was - were Joshua, who had been the one to call him a victim at the start of the session, Eli and Paul, who were constantly exchanging glances and miming words at each other as a silent mean of communication while someone else was talking, and Jimmy, the boy sitting next to him who the circle of introducing themselves had started off with. They moved clockwise, all the way through the circle (including Jasper and Ariel, who gave an extended account of their job, family, personality, and more), slowly nearing John, who was sitting at the right side of Brian. Brian was curious to find out more about John, the person who had just proved when he had been alone in the bathroom with him that he was perfectly capable of conversating but who in public preferred to keep his jaws clenched together. Unfortunately for him, John did just this when Sebastian, the guy sitting next to him, passed on his turn of speaking to John.

‘Well, the last of us, then. Go ahead, John,’ Ariel encouraged him, but John, on the other hand, crossed his arms over his chest and stared into the void when he uttered the few words he was willing to share with the rest of the company.

‘John. Twenty. Depression.’

Silence across the group for a moment while people waited for John to expose some more about his life, family, or hobbies, but when nothing happened, Jasper coughed awkwardly to try (and fail) to catch John’s attention.

‘Three mere words?’ he asked, sounding both confused and perhaps a bit indignant. ‘I’m sure you have something more to tell Brian about yourself.’

Brian instinctively felt that John had turned to face him, so he turned his head to the side so he could look at him. John’s expression seemed to be blank at first, but he could swear he saw a hint of a smile at the corner of John’s lips right before the younger man turned to look at the group leader who had issued the command again.

‘We’re roommates. He’ll find out about the rest of me soon enough.’

# # #

‘I’m sure you didn’t make yourself look like a complete fool.’

‘I did! I literally ran away half crying.’

‘So?’

‘What do you mean, so? I looked like an idiot!’

Hours after the dramatical start of the morning therapy session, Brian still found himself unable to let go of how he felt like he had embarrassed himself in front of his entire therapy group. Despite Freddie’s attempts to talk it out of his head, Brian simply could not let go of the idea that people thought of him as weak, emotionally unstable, a cry baby - and worst of all, he was starting to think of himself in the exact same manner. Of course he knew that overemotionality could be a symptom of his borderline, but this was not exactly a valid excuse to run out of the room when someone made you talk out loud in front of hardly a dozen people, now did it?

‘You did not!’ Freddie threw back at him for what must have been at least the fiftieth time that afternoon. Brian wondered why he did not simply give up on trying to convince him that he hadn’t looked like an idiot out there, but for some reason, Freddie seemed too determined to give in. More than that, he even called out to his boyfriend for reinforcement of his case. ‘Roger, say something about it, will you?’

‘About what?’ the boy walking on the other side of Brian answered, obviously not having paid attention to the ongoing attention. Since the moment the four of them had reunited in their bedroom after their therapy sessions, Brian had been unable to speak of anything else apart from how stupid he had made himself look. All of his roommates had dealt with this in another way; John had shut down immediately by lying down on his bed to break his world record in ceiling staring, Freddie had started the discussion with him, and Roger had been a mix of both, first bravely having tried to make Brian see it was not that bad, but eventually having given up after two hours or so. Right now, about five hours after the infamous therapy session, everyone apart from Freddie had stopped trying to change Brian’s mind about the matter; Roger obviously had shut his mind off from the discussion, and John had not even joined them in their attempt to give Brian somewhat of a tour through the building. Of course, John’s refusal to go with them could also stem from his general reluctance to leave the bed, but Brian could not shake off the idea that it was at least partly his fault for not having been able to shut up about having embarrassed himself that morning.

‘Give him a shove on my behalf,’ Freddie told Brian, since he could not reach Roger himself now that they were walking in a row of three next to each other through one of the main hallways of the institution they planned to show Brian some more off in an attempt to get his mind off his insecurity. ‘Either way, I was just telling Roger there’s no need to worry about this morning’s event, like we did one thousand times before,’ he said with a frown towards Brian of which he was not sure if it was meant to be funny or serious.

‘ _Brian_ ,’ Roger sighed, obviously not amused by the fact that his boyfriend was dragging him into this discussion yet again. ‘People will understand. We’ve all been new here at some point.’

‘But I’m sure the two of you did not cry during group therapy on the first day,’ Brian muttered.

‘Not on the first day. That’s where you’re right,’ Freddie chuckled, and Brian turned to him while they passed the corner of the hallway. It seemed like Freddie was inviting him to ask him when he had cried instead, then, but before he could ask him when this had been the case, he was distracted by some noise going on at the other side of the hallway. People seemed to be yelling, shouting, and when he squinted, he could see at least a handful of people dressed in the same grey shirts as them either running around the place or standing still, all focussed on a few people standing in the middle of a circle of bystanders.

‘What’s going on?’ Brian asked with a frown, slowing down his pace while he tried to focus on what on earth was happening.

‘Are they arm wrestling for joints again?’ Roger grinned, but Freddie discarded the idea.

‘No, they’re taunting someone, it seems,’ he said, and when the three of them unanimously decided to be quiet for a moment, they could indeed hear some insults and scorns that were bad enough to realise that whatever was going down was not supposed to be a game.

‘Should we warn someone?’ Roger asked no one in particular, and whereas Brian normally would have agreed that this probably would have been the best idea, right now he somehow felt drawn to finding out what was going on before they would call in help. After all, for all they knew it was nothing but friendly rivalry, and he did not want to make himself look like a pussy for the second time in just one day. Freddie was the first to step up and walk towards the source of noise and movement, followed by Brian, and Roger eventually stepped in as well.

They carefully approached the growing multitude of people; the circle had grown to the extent where they could not see what was going on, as their view was blocked by other bystanders. Brian, having the advantage of being taller than most people around, could see that three people were standing in the middle of the circle, and they were talking - taunting, more like - to someone else. For a moment he thought they were aiming their cruel words at someone of the audience, but when the person standing in front of him took a step to the side, he could see that there was yet someone else in the middle of the circle.

Who this person was, he could not make out; he was kneeling on the floor while three other guys were standing in front of him, taunting him and insulting him while the rest of the people did nothing but look on.

‘Please! Leave me alone!’ the victim cried out, which only seemed to fuel the three men around him in their willingness to hurt him.

‘Look at him, sitting on the floor begging for his life. How pathetic,’ one of the bullies sneered.

‘Especially when you take into account that he was so desperate to die not even a week ago!’ another one of them said, and the sound of laughter his two friends made Brian feel sick to the stomach. He hardly noticed it when Freddie, suddenly having shown up next to him, vehemently shook his shoulder to make an announcement.

‘Remember those two who stole your towels yesterday? Jake and Drew? That’s them, together with a friend of them,’ Freddie told him, but Brian hardly heard him. All he could hear was the sound of crying of the boy on the floor, all he could see was how one of the guys lashed out at him, and all he could think of was that it had to _stop_.

‘That was you right, wasn’t it? Being rushed into the nurse’s office because you had slit your wrists once again?’ one of them said as they leaned in to the boy sobbing his heart out on the floor. His voice sounded bittersweet, and Brian could hardly oppress a gasp when he suddenly gripped the wrist of the boy on the floor, tugging at the white fabric around it until it eventually came off in a long piece of bandage. It was then that Brian realised it could be no one else but the boy who had been sitting next to him in the group therapy that morning.

‘It’s Jimmy, from my therapy group,’ Brian told Freddie complete in disbelief that this was really happening. He was completely nailed to the floor, even more so than when he had been earlier that morning. ‘Someone needs to get help!’ was all he managed to squeak at his roommate, but his voice was drowned in the taunting of the victim and whose assaulters.

‘Leave me alone!’ the blond boy repeated, tugging at the fabric - which, the more it was rolled off his wrist, the redder the colour of it became.

‘But you couldn’t do it, as usual,’ the bittersweet voice continued. ‘You were too weak to do it. How many times have you tried to kill yourself so far? Three, four times? God, boy, you’re an embarrassment to the suicidals in this place,’ the guy sneered, before he grabbed Jimmy by the hair, drawing a scream from the boy and a gasp from Brian, who felt anger boiling up inside of him. Why was there no help on the way? Why would no one fucking do something, anything to make this stop?

‘Will you make a choice to either kill yourself or not? Leaving us hanging on is becoming such a fucking drag,’ the same bully said to Jimmy with the emphasis on the last word of the sentence, after which he roughly shoved Jimmy away from him. Brian reached out a helpless hand, as if this could possibly help his group mate from getting up again and standing up against whoever these despicable people were.

‘Someone call the wardens!’ Brian heard someone behind him screaming out, but it did not seem like anyone was actively trying to find someone to solve the situation going on. Brian, having no clue where to find a reasonable amount of wardens to put a stop to this abuse - and, knowing that the situation could get even more out of hand by the time these would eventually arrive - decided that they had to take matters into their own hands.

‘I’m gonna jump in,’ he hissed at Freddie, who reacted by gripping Brian’s upper arm between his twig-like fingers and giving him a glance as if Brian had just admitted he was plotting to overthrow the government single-handedly.

‘Are you crazy? They might beat you up!’ Freddie told him, but Brian easily shook himself apart from Freddie’s weak grip.

‘For all I care. This has to _stop_ ,’ he said, making Freddie back off involuntarily at the unexpected determination in his voice. He turned his gaze to the guy who had gripped onto Jimmy’s by now uncovered wrist again, speaking another set of hurtful words that sent Brian over the edge.

‘You’re such a weakling, you know that? If you would just fucking die, you’d make room in this place for someone else, and actual person instead of a pile of sadness-’

‘That’s enough! Leave him alone!’

Silence followed for a moment when the entire circle of people - including the three abusers and their victim - looked up at the person who had just spoken up from out of nowhere. Even Brian himself needed a moment to realise and let it sink in that it really had been him who had just caught everyone (any mainly himself) by surprise by having shouted out to the people he otherwise would have run away from at earliest convenience. He had no idea why he had decided to step up right now; certainly, there must have been stronger, taller, more socially capable people around the attendants of this act of abuse than him - it felt to Brian like anyone else but him would have been better capable of handling this situation. However, it was too late to turn to someone else to take it from him now that he had called out to the abusers. He had put himself out there, and now it was his job to bring this to a somewhat decent end.

Still there was silence; hardly anyone around the place even seemed to dare to move. The bully, obviously caught off guard by the interference from someone he was likely to not ever have seen around before, loosened his grip around Jimmy’s wrist. It was only then, when the guy - a few inches and at least fifty pounds heavier than Brian - turned to him that Brian realised he had involuntarily taken a few steps forward to separate himself from the audience that had done _nothing_ but watch while someone was being beaten up, and put himself right in the spot for anyone to fight him over having stepped up for Jimmy.

‘ _Excuse_ me?’ the guy said to him in a dangerously low voice that betrayed anger and disbelief about the fact that someone seemed to be capable of standing up against him. Another time, such confrontation would have made Brian shrink and back off, and as much as he wanted to do this right now, he repeatedly told himself he could not - for the sake of Jimmy, the sake of his own confidence, the sake of letting people know abuse was unacceptable. Therefore, Brian stretched his body out a bit as to appear a bit more intimidating (if at all possible) and faced the guy with a gold gaze.

‘You bloody well heard me,’ Brian said, a second after realising himself that the language he was using did not fit his personality one bit. This was of course less than a minor detail to him now that Jimmy was lying on the floor while some douchebag refused to leave him the fuck alone. His anger fuelled by the thought of this, Brian added. ‘Get your hands off of him.’

A snicker followed; a low sound of amusement that made Brian feel sick to the stomach. ‘You think you can tell me what to do?’ the guy sneered.

‘I think anyone can tell you what to do when you’re beating someone up,’ Brian said calmer than he ever could have imagined himself to have been in a situation like this. ‘Now let him go.’

For a second, the guy - Brian heard some people around him call him Drew, so he assumed that must have been his name - did not seem to know how to reply, but he soon picked himself up again. He tightened his fingers around Jimmy’s injured wrist, tightly enough to make the latter’s face twist and hiss in pain, before he leisurely told Brian: ‘Make me.’

Brian squinted his eyes at Drew when he saw the effect Drew’s grip around Jimmy’s lower arm was having on his teammate. It was cruel to push someone to the floor at any rate, but doing this and topping to off by gripping the injured wrist of a suicidal boy to the point where he seemed close to crying, was simply inhumane. Brian wished he could last out at Drew, punch him in the face, kick against his shin and make him and his ego crumble to the ground. He knew this was not going to be a realistic perspective; Brian himself was not strong enough to pull off any of this on Drew, and even if he did, the two assholes of friends of his were standing right by his side to do the same to him but ten times worse. It was not that Brian particularly minded any of this in his current state of rage, but he knew he had to set his priorities - which, no matter how badly wanted to, at the moment were not bringing Drew down, but freeing Jimmy from whose grip.

Therefore, Brian took another step forwards and put his hand on Drew’s, which in turn was clinging around Jimmy’s wrist. He hoped the guy did not notice the shakiness of his fingers too much when he clenched them around the back of Drew’s hand and vehemently tried to shake it off, pull it off, squeeze it off, do anything that was within his power to make the abuser lay his hands off his teammate, but nothing he did seemed to move the hand even an inch, much to Drew’s amusement.

‘Is this all you’ve got? Pathetic,’ Drew laughed, and his friends joined him like a bunch of machines who had been trained to follow their leader in anything he did. Brian shot him a glare in an attempt to silence him, which unfortunately only seemed to be funny to the crew.

‘If looks could kill, Drew,’ one of his friends scorned, which of course was followed by another round of laughter. Brian heard someone - either Freddie or Roger, he assumed, since no one else around this place knew his name yet - call out his name, tell him to leave it off, but he shook it off, determined to reach his goal.

‘Let go. Now,’ he hissed, clenching his fingers around Drew’s hand.

‘What will you do? Claw me?’ the guy chuckled, which was an idea Brian had not considered yet. Now that he did, though, an evil grin spread across his face; his nails were not particularly long, but he hadn’t cut them in a while and they hardly ever broke, telling him they were strong; strong enough to claw at the skin of this douchebag at any rate.

‘Thanks for the idea,’ Brian told him calmly as he positioned his nails vertically above the hand of Drew, pressing his nails deeply inside the skin before he dragged them all the way towards the fingertips. Drew attempted to laugh, but Brian could see in the way the corner of his mouth twitched that he was not exactly enjoying the burning feeling of his skin being scratched, and he knew he had him hooked. Brian dragged his nails back again, then forth, repeated the movement at a faster pace, leaving red scratches and lines all over the delicate skin of the back of Drew’s hand to the point where he heard the man grunt and struggle to keep his fingers around Jimmy’s wrist.

‘How do you like this? I won’t hesitate to make it fucking _bleed_ ,’ Brian informed him in a low voice he didn’t even know he had, but it seemed to have an effect on Drew, who pulled his hand away from Brian’s sharp nails all of the sudden, and, by doing so, allowed Jimmy to break away from him.

‘You son of a bitch,’ Drew hissed at him, pressing the crimson red skin of his hand against his cheek, the colour of which had started to resemble that of the scratched back of his hand in pure rage.

‘Thank you,’ Brian said, watching with a relieved smile as Jimmy took his window of opportunity to scramble off the floor. Two people of the crowd took him into their care and escorted him away from the circle, the act of which restored Brian’s hope in the people in the place a bit.

He did not get too much time to focus on how Jimmy was doing and which place people were bringing him off to; soon Brian realised that with Jimmy’s departure, he had been left to face Drew and his friends on his own, and he hardly dared to turn and look at Drew’s unmistakingly angry face. ‘You… you made a mistake just there,’ Drew spat out at him with ill-laced anger in his voice.

 _I do nothing but making mistakes all the time,_ Brian thought to himself, but as much as he wanted to tell this in order to outsmart the abusers, his voice seemed to have left him. Sure, he had been nervous when sticking up for Jimmy, but not as much as he was right now; he suddenly felt himself sick with fear now that he had to stand up against the bullies - and mainly Drew - on his own. Brian knew he had embarrassed him in front of his peers and friends, and Drew was going to get his revenge for this one way or another.

Of course, he could not break down and cry right now; not without putting up a decent fight first. ‘Our opinions seem to differ just there, in that case,’ Brian told Drew calmly, even though his heart was pounding in his chest and he felt the palms of his hands starting to become clam from sweat.

‘You must be new here,’ Drew guessed correctly as he took a step forwards to Brian, who had a hard time not taking a step back in response. ‘Not knowing the consequences of standing in my way.’

Brian swallowed heavily, and no matter how much he wanted to in order to prove whatever remained of his strength, he could not look Drew in the eyes anymore. He instead looked down at the floor around his feet, but while doing so, he saw his opponent reaching down for the pocket of his trousers and taking out an object he could not identify in the swiftness with which he handled it, but which he knew was probably not going to be good news - a thought that was being fuelled when people around them started taking steps back and called out to drew. Cries of ‘Drew, don’t do it!’, ‘Back off, guys!’, and ‘Where is security when you need them?’ filled the space.

Brian had no idea what people were referring to, but he found out soon enough. There was something in the palm of his enemy’s hand, an iron tool, and within a matter of just one blink of the eye, the knife had been folded out, the blade of it positioned against Brian’s right cheekbone.

That, in all honesty, was _not_ something Brian had been prepared for. Never before had he been standing eye in eye with someone pointing a knife at him, and more than that, he had not expected to find such a person in a heavily guarded place like this. If he hadn’t been allowed to take a roll of adhesive tape with him, then how on earth had Drew managed to smuggle a full-sizes stiletto knife inside this building?

Now did not seem to be the right time to think about the whereabouts of the weapon - not when Brian felt the tip of it being pressed closer against the skin right below his eyes.

‘One wrong word, one wrong movement, and you’ll lose an eye,’ Drew hissed at him, but as everyone had fallen silent by now, it was loud enough for the entire multitude to hear.

‘Alright then, that’s enough,’ Brian heard a familiar voice calling out. He could not turn his head to see who it had been out of fear this would cost him an eye, but the way Drew shut the person down, was enough for him to establish that it could be nobody else than Freddie who had attempted to stick up for him.

‘The same goes for all of you. And especially for _you_ , you dirty fag. You can go back to starving yourself,’ Drew spat out, and Brian felt rage welling up inside of him. More people around him seemed to disagree with the way Drew spoke of his roommate, but no one dared doing more than exchanging indignant glances between each other out of fear that they’d be the reason Drew would poke out Brian’s eye. Brian, however, was so fed up with the way this asshole was terrorising the entire community just now that he was determined to tell him what he thought of him, whether it would cost him an eye or not.

‘You take that back,’ Brian hissed, swallowing thickly when Drew instantly reacted by pressing the knife tightly against the upper side of his cheekbone, slowly scraping the tip of it along Brian’s skin. Still, Brian would not back away from what he had just ordered; by calling Freddie the insults he just had, Drew had really crossed a line. Freddie was the dearest person Brian had met so far, the optimist who was determined not to give up on trying to make him feel better and more secure about himself, the one to show him around the place and try his best to make him feel at home. It was probably too early to call him his friend yet, but still, Brian would allow no one to speak of Freddie this way, whether they threatened to poke out his eye or not.

‘What did you just say?’ Drew asked him, obviously still not believing there was anyone inside of this place who had the audacity (or the stupidity; that was something Brian had yet to figure out) to talk back to him.

‘Brian, don’t go there! It’s not worth it!’ Brian heard Freddie call out, but he decided to ignore him.

‘I told you to take. That. _Back_ ,’ Brian repeated, placing extra stress on the latter three words of the sentence. The knife against his cheekbone made him feel dizzy and nauseous, but giving in was no option - not now that he had come so far and now that hordes of people were looking at him.

‘You’ve got some nerve talking to me like that,’ Drew growled, reaching out one finger to wipe up the thin line of blood that welled up from the cut he had just drawn across Brian’s face. Brian winced when the guy touched his face; he started feeling the superficial yet painful scratch - or cut, perhaps, judging by the appearance of blood - Drew had brought onto his face, but he remained perfectly calm and silent, even when his opponent picked up his arm and smeared the blood along the line of his wrist. Without needing to be told so, Brian knew it referred to Jimmy’s suicide attempt.

‘You might want to follow his example. Pull through with it, perhaps,’ Drew suggested lightly. Before Brian got the chance to react to this disgustingly disrespectful suggestion in any kind of manner, the sound of people rushing in and yelling something that did not ring through to him in his current state of anger, disgust, and wonder how many years he would have to serve for manslaughter. The circle was pulled apart as men in dark blue uniforms entered the room; the security everyone had been calling for but which either no one had gone off to fetch, or which simply had been so disorganised that it had taken them longer to arrive at the spot than it would have been if they would have called the actual police to pull up at the crime scene.

Voices calling out to them (to Drew, mainly) to ‘Let go of each other!’ and ‘Drop that knife!’ surrounded the space, and Brian dazedly gazed at the security guard standing in front of him while another hooked his arms behind his back and pulled him away from the middle of the circle. The same was done to Drew, who, as soon as the knife was confiscated and the guards tried to take control of his arms, reacted by violently trying to push people away, shout at the security, and most of all, vowed to take revenge on Brian. This behaviour soon showed the guards who had been the culprit and who had been the victim between the pair of them; Drew was carried off to a place unknown to Brian, while he himself was let go of. He was glad to find that Freddie and Roger sent other people off to get him a glass of water, to bring over the nurse, and to give the guards an account of what had happened, just so they would not buzz around Brian. Especially the latter option seemed to be a popular one; almost the entire audience was willing to share their view on what had been going down between Drew and Jimmy, and how Brian had jumped in on them. Some of the details people mentioned where not entirely correct, but Brian just let him be; all he could do was sit on the floor and stare at a random spot on the wall across from him while people around him either help the guards to established a clear picture of the event or were sent back to their room or activity they had to attend. He was eventually left with just Freddie and Roger, the first of which had already embraced him a hundred times and praised him even more often for his bravery, while the latter would not stop talking of how Brian’s actions had baffled the entire population of Queen Mary’s, and that there was no need to worry about having run out of the therapy session that morning anymore when this story would get around.

The thought of people reciting this story, with all of the truths and errors it would acquire overtime as it was passed on from person to person, was not exactly making Brian feel any better, but at the same time, it was the last of his concerns right now. Two security guards crouched down on the floor in front of him to hear his final take of what had been going down, before they eventually dropped him off at the nurse’s office to do something about the cut on his upper cheekbone, from which a thin line of blood was still dripping down. He was hoping to catch Jimmy in there and share a word with him, let him know that he did not deserve to be treated like that, but the nurse - an older lady with a sour face but a kind heart - told him she had sent him over to his psychiatrist right after she had patched up his wrist to help him calm down from the panic attack the abuse had given him. Brian nodded patiently while she cleaned the cut on his cheek with medical alcohol, thanking her for the service and promising to drop by the day after to see if the wound was healing nicely.

With Freddie and Roger walking on either side of him, Brian walked back to the dorm room they had come from just about an hour earlier. Not too much of their tour through the building had come through, but neither of them was in the mood to go pick it up now; Freddie because he believed Brian needed some peace of mind, Roger because he was all too excited to tell John about the unexpected adventure, and Brian because he really, _really_ wanted to get away from everyone.

Brian averted his gaze from the people they ran across in the hallway, half of them already seeming to know what had going down and the other half probably finding out before dinnertime would come around. He simply let Freddie brush them off with a kind but insistent ‘Now is not the right time, darling,’ while Roger excitedly pulled him through the hallways and, eventually, into their bedroom. Brian was quick to pull the door close behind him and press the latch close to prevent any nosy patient or concerned therapist from entering their bedroom, after which he walked towards his bed and let his body fall down on it. He felt a sharp, stinging pain when his face landed against the pillow a bit too hard for the liking of his newly acquired cut - which was, he suddenly thought dimly to himself, the first one ever he had not brought onto himself with his own hands. Perhaps with his own stupidity and overconfidence, but not with his own hands.

Brian ignored the pain in his cheekbone and closed his eyes for what he hoped was going to be the remainder of the day, but Roger’s excited voice would not allow him to do more than simply lie there and be mentally absent while he spoke to an equally indifferent John.

‘You’ll never guess what happened today!’ Roger said as he plunged down on the foot end of John’s bed, making his roommate grumble at the sudden change from quietness to noise.

‘You found a hair in your instant coffee,’ John suggested, turning from his back to his side to make it clear to Roger that he wanted to be left alone - not that Roger either noted or cared, unfortunately.

‘No, it’s something actually exciting,’ Roger said, indirectly insisting John should guess in order to find out, even though all the signs were clear enough that he was not up for this.

‘ _Two_ hairs in your instant coffee,’ John mumbled into his pillow, which earned him a slap against his upper leg from his friend.

‘No, I’m being serious here! I’ll give you a hint,’ Roger said after he had rolled his eyes at this response. ‘It has nothing to do with defect toilets, food fights, or the shitty coffee machine. Brian protected Jimmy from Drew having worked him down to the floor, and then Drew pulled out a knife at him during the fight that followed.’

‘Do you call that a hint, darling? That’s more like the entire outline of the story,’ Freddie chuckled as he sat down on Brian’s bed, lightly stroking whose lower leg in an eternal attempt to soothe him from what he had just been pulled through.

‘Jimmy Elliot? The boy who tried to commit suicide again the other day?’ John asked matter-of-factly, before he turned around to face Roger when the subject of all the action finally got through to him. ‘Wait, Brian? _Our_ Brian?’

‘Our Brian! You should have seen him, Deaks, when he ran straight up to Drew and his gang to make them lay off!’ Roger told a confused looking John excitedly.

‘I did not exactly run up to him…’ Brian mumbled in interference, but he was not exactly in the mood to start a discussion about what he had or had not done. More than that, Freddie already seemed to take the role of truth-teller onto him, saving Brian from having to do so himself.

‘Well, he called out to him to stop it, and when Drew wouldn’t let go of Jimmy, he put his hand on the hand Drew was using to grab Jimmy’s arm with, and scratched it with his nails until he had to let go of Jimmy eventually,’ Freddie told John a more accurate account of what had happened, before he turned to Brian, picking up whose hand and studying the nails of it in particular. ‘Speaking of which... I think these hands deserve a manicure after what we’ve been going through.’

‘That’s… quite something,’ John reacted to the story after a few seconds of silence. Even though the answer was reserved as always when in public, Brian could swear he could hear a hint of surprise - shock, perhaps even - in his voice. He was unsure if this was the result of John thinking it was unacceptable that violence would take place in a community like this and against a vulnerable person such as Jimmy, or if he had not expected someone as bland and vulnerable (as he had proved himself to be earlier that morning) to step up against abuse. Brian expected it to be the latter option, but John’s answer did not exactly give him a look inside his soul. Before he could think about it a lot more, Roger had already started ranting on again.

‘But you haven’t heard half of it yet!’ he said, shaking John’s shoulder violently - which Brian was sure was not something the younger man could appreciate either now or at any other given point in time, really. ‘Drew was of course furious at Brian, so he told him about having made a mistake and all that sort of thing… And then he suddenly pulled out a knife at him, but Brian didn’t even flinch.’ The part where Roger claimed that he hadn’t even flinched was something Brian also did not agree with, but he did not get the chance to tell John the story himself when John directed a question at Roger.

‘A knife?’ John repeated in misunderstanding, as if he must have misheard Roger just there, but Roger was quick to cure him from wondering.

‘An actual stiletto knife, or a butterfly knife, or whatever people call that shit… Anyway, it was this full-sized, and he just pulled it out of his pocket as if it was nothing special,’ Roger continued his story. ‘He pressed it against Brian’s cheek and cut him in the face with it when Brian stood up for Freddie when Drew called him-’

‘He cut him in the face? With a knife?’ John asked before Roger could even finish his sentence, which Brian found to be quite something new. Surely, their youngest roommate had so far proven to be ready to cut them off when they were making too much noise or talking about topics he considered to be bullshit, but John interrupting them for clarification, out of interest, was something Brian had not seen before.

‘Yes, really! You should come and see it,’ Roger told him, excitedly pulling at John’s arm to indicate he had to follow him to the bed on which Bran had slumped down.

‘I don’t think Brian wants all of us-’ John started, but Roger simply hoisted him out of bed before he could say more to protest. Brian overhearing the sounds of shifting sheets and footsteps on the floor, got the hint that the pair of them were on their way to approach him. Brian sighed softly to himself; he did not feel like showing off the cut like a wound he had acquired in battle, as Roger was making it out to be. He did not even feel like removing his face from the pillow he had buried it into, and instead wished everyone would just leave him alone.

‘It’s just something of a scratch,’ Brian said in an attempt to prevent people from entering his personal space, but the sound of two pairs of footsteps into the direction of his bed told him that this was going to happen whether he liked it or not.

‘No, It’s an actual cut. He had to go to the nurse for it,’ Roger said as if it was the most exciting thing he’d heard in a month - which could be the case, for all Brian knew. He did not imagine too much to be going on at this place, unless, of course, it was routine for patients to pull out knives at each other whenever they disagreed with each other.

‘Come on, Brian, you gotta show it to John. He got out of bed for this!’ Roger said as he shook his side in an attempt to make Brian turn over, but all this did was making Brian cling into the pillow he had buried his face into even more than before. God, could Roger really not see that he was not in the mood to be treated like a war hero when all he had done was stepping up against bullying and abuse, as every decent person should have done?

‘You _pulled_ me out of bed, that is,’ John corrected him somewhat grumpily. Still, he did not seem to try and break away from Roger’s grip around his arm, did not protest any more against having been dragged out of bed, did not make his way back to his favourite spot in the room. He just stood next to Roger, in front of Brian’s bed, as if he was somewhat curious about what had happened to Brian. With this in the back of his mind, together with Roger’s insistent ‘pleeeaase?’ and Freddie telling him he’d only have to show it once in order to get rid of Roger, Brian eventually gave in and turned around in his bed, exposing the cut on his cheek to the people standing around him.

‘Well then, this is all,’ Brian said, not understanding why Roger was making such a fuss about showing his cheek off to their roommate, to whom the events of just half an hour ago hardly seemed to get through now that Roger and Freddie were sloppily trying to reproduce the entire story.

‘Yes, look at this! He literally just pulled his knife along Brian’s cheek,’ Roger said while following the thin, red line with his finger. It was more sensitive than Brian would have imagined, and he had to bite on the inside of his cheek to keep himself from emitting any sort of sound that would betray the pain he felt. Roger seemed oblivious to all of this; he gladly made an attempt to tell the boy he had just hauled out of bed - and who was awkwardly standing next to him - what had been going down.

‘… So then Drew said that if either Brian or anyone else would say one wrong word or make one wrong move, he would cut out Brian’s eye,’ Roger retold the tale. ‘So then Freddie stepped up and said that was enough, and Drew told him to shut up and… Can I repeat what he said to you?’ Roger momentarily paused his rattling to ask Freddie for permission.

‘Sure, I mean… What did he call me again? A nasty fag or so?’ Freddie answered.

‘No, I think it was dirty fag. Either way, everyone was outraged-’

‘It didn’t look like they were,’ Freddie interrupted Roger, who shot him a glance.

‘Of course they were! They just couldn’t show it, because no one wanted to be the reason Brian would be missing an eye for the rest of his life!’

‘Drew would not have done that for real though,’ Freddie said.

‘He would! You know how he is!’ Roger said in a tone of excitement that was hardly appropriate for the situation - especially now that Brian, still shaken up by the entire event, was present in the room.

‘He would not, Roger, he’s not that stupid,’ Freddie rolled his eyes, before he remarked: ‘God, you’re so jumpy today! What’s up with you? Have you had anything you shouldn’t have had?’

‘Nothing!’ Roger said a bit too quickly. ‘They just topped up my antidepressants the other week, maybe that’s starting to kick in,’ he said, but Brian did not miss the way he faced away from Freddie while giving him this explanation, as if he knew himself that antidepressants never could lift him up quite like this. He did not get too much time to contemplate if his roommate was speaking the truth or not though, for Roger was eager to start off the conversation again. ‘Fred, you _know_ Drew has anger issues, and he’s been in prison for abuse of some sort. I wouldn’t put it past him to gouge out someone’s eye.’

While the pair of them continued bickering over who had said exactly what, how the audience had reacted to everything either Drew or Brian had done, and how security had eventually put an end to the fight, Brian could do nothing but awkwardly look away from the people having gathered around his bed. He felt terribly exposed now that Roger had made him reveal the cut on his cheek on purpose and now that Freddie and he were summing up an account of events, and could do nothing but wish it would be over soon.

The noise which Freddie and Roger used for the purpose of their discussion eventually made Brian look up at him to see if they were not strangling each other yet, but when doing so, it was not the couple that caught his attention - it was John. John, who was standing in between the pair of them, focussing on his face in a somewhat blank manner. Brian looked back at him in an attempt to discover if John had spaced out or if he was actually studying his face. The first option seemed more realistic to him, knowing John rather had been in bed with everyone around him being quiet. However when John’s neutral glance eventually softened after having looked Brian in the eyes for a long, dreadfully long ten seconds, Brian guessed it had to be the second option instead.

‘Are you okay?’ John whispered at him. His voice was almost drowned in the sound of Roger and Freddie’s bickering, but Brian, not focussing on either of them, could make out what he was saying without a problem.

‘It’s fine. Just a scratch,’ he shrugged, his eyes never leaving John’s when his roommate looked at him somewhat doubtfully. Or perhaps doubtful was not the right word to describe it; sorrowful was perhaps a better description of the expression in John’s eyes, as if he was genuinely sorry for Brian having had his cheek sliced open by a bully when all he had wanted to do was help somebody.

‘This place is full of psychopaths like Drew. Take care of yourself,’ John instructed him with that same expression on his face, and Brian nodded at him, feeling queasy at just the thought of even more abusive assholes walking around this place. He was not sure of John had used the word ‘psychopath’ just as to describe Drew and his terrible behaviour, or if that was actually his diagnosis, the reason why he had been locked up in this place. Especially the latter option was one that did not leave him but continued to circle around in his brain, even when John left the side of his bed after having spoken these words to jump back into his usual state of indifference, when he saw Drew’s people shooting him deadly glares during dinner that evening, and, more than anything else, when he cried himself to sleep for the second day in a row that night.


	5. Part Five

‘Brian May?’

Brian’s glance was fixated on the person standing next to him rather than the psychiatrist who had just stepped outside of her office to call out his name and invite him in. Brian felt uncomfortable in the hallway among people waiting for their turn to meet with their psychiatrists (and who in the meantime mainly stared at him), but the thought of having to follow the woman into the office she had just appeared from, made him feel even more queasy. He did not exactly have any positive experience with psychiatrists, and even though she had seemed nice enough when meeting her the day before, he doubted if Miss Gaskell would be able to change his view on psychiatrists as glorified intruders to his personal business.

‘Come on, darling. You can do it.’

Brian felt Freddie’s twig-like fingers giving the palm of his hand a bit of a squeeze as to encourage him to follow his new psychiatrist. Even though it did not manage to calm him down even the slightest, Brian still appreciated the gesture, and more than that, the fact that Freddie had come with him to bring him to the office he had to meet his psychiatrist at four times a week starting today.

Since the moment Brian had been released from Drew’s grip and knife the day before, Freddie seemed to have officiated himself as Brian’s personal bodyguard, making sure strangers stayed out of his way during mealtime and queuing up for medicines, and convincing Brian to go places even when he did not want to out of fear that Drew or one of his henchmen would go after him to carry out the revenge Drew had sworn he would get on him. Even though he knew that Freddie, with his 5’7 statue that he estimated could hardly weigh more than a hundred, perhaps a hundred and five pound if they were lucky, would not be able to physically stand up against Drew and whatever kind of people he had gathered to terrorise this building, Brian was still happy to have Freddie around so he did not have to go places on his own now that he had accidentally put himself in the spotlight.

‘Thanks for bringing me here,’ Brian whispered at Freddie, flashing him as much of a smile as he was capable of at the moment. It wasn’t much, but Freddie seemed to take it either way.

‘I had nothing to do at this point in time anyway. And I quite like walking around the place with a celebrity,’ Freddie said with a wink, which seemed to manage to make everyone around - the psychiatrist, Freddie, some other random patients in the same hallway - smile, apart from Brian himself. He knew Freddie was only joking, but God, he _hated_ the fact that he had had less than 24 hours of anonymity before he had unwillingly presented himself to the entire population of the mental institution when all he had wanted to do was remain invisible throughout his stay here. He had positioned himself in a way for people to either love him or loathe him, and it made him wish he never would have engaged in the fight, never even would have known a fight had been going on yesterday afternoon. Deep down inside he knew he had done the right thing by stepping up for Jimmy, and although he knew he would never regret having saved him from probably having been harassed even more by his bullies, Brian still could not shake off the desire for another solution than having jumped in himself and having declared himself as the number one target for Drew and his henchmen. Maybe he should have done nothing, let others fix the problem, waited for security to come rushing in and safe whatever had been left to safe of the situation…

‘I’ll come pick you up in an hour,’ Freddie told him, bringing Brian out of his thought and making him face the reality that Freddie was going to have to leave any moment, and that he himself had to follow the woman who was standing before him, smiling at him so kindly and invitingly while all he wanted to do was run away. He didn’t want to follow Miss. Gaskell, didn’t want to let her lock the pair of them up in her office and let her pry into his personal life, thoughts, and businesses. He wished he could ask Freddie if he could come with him, just like you would have your parents be with you in the room during your dentist visit when you were nine, even though Brian knew this would not be possible. There was a strict polity of patient privacy at Queen Mary’s, meaning that no one apart from psychiatrists and similar mental health experts were allowed to follow the conversations going on between the four walls of these offices. Considering the way his former psychiatrist had practically thrown his medical papers all over the place for the entire country to read, Brian knew it should be a huge relief to him to know that this place took the protection of his personal data very seriously. He did not feel like this, however; now that Freddie separated himself from him and gave a small wave before walking out of the hallway, leaving him behind with just Miss Gaskell.

Brian sensed how the woman - who, standing next to the door while he was sitting - practically towered over him and looked at him rather intensely. He tried, but could not bring himself to look up at her, to say something to her, and most of all not to get up from the chair that felt like never getting out of.

‘Well then, a true celebrity. I’ve never had the pleasure of having had one in my office,’ Miss Gaskell said in what Brian assumed was an attempt to break the ice; one that might have worked on someone else, but not at him. All it made him want to do was run away, curl up in bed, and stay there until everyone had forgotten about his unexpectedly heroic action.

‘Freddie loves exaggerating,’ Brian  mumbled while looking at the direction into which his roommate disappeared one more time, disappointed to find that Freddie had already crossed the swing doors and was thus out of sight for him.

‘I’ve heard some stories about that, yes,’ Miss Gaskell said with an ever-lingering smile that was starting to make Brian nervous. ‘But I’m more interested in the stories I’ve heard about you.’

 _Oh God, she’s already heard about what kind of fool I am,_ Brian thought to himself while trying hard not to sigh out loud. He had hoped that she had just been joking along with Freddie’s comment of him being a ‘celebrity’,  but it seemed like his psychiatrist was well-informed of yesterday’s events. Brian knew it should not surprise him, and perhaps it did not surprise him after all - perhaps the emotion he felt was closer to disappointment or even frustration. Frustration that even now, during his first intake with his new psychiatrist, he could not start off blankly. It seemed like he was uncapable of walking into a place without already having people knowing things about him he did not want them to know. John had immediately figured out he was a self-harmer, the entire canteen had turned their heads to look at him when he had walked in for breakfast and lunch earlier that day, and even now, his psychiatrist already seemed to regard him as some kind of saint before he had even said a word to her about the matter himself.

‘ _People_ love exaggerating,’ Brian altered his previous statement to make it apply to the general public - in this particular case the patients of Queen Mary’s, of whom he was sure must have added more than just some heroic details to make an impressive story out of him helplessly clawing at Drew’s hand until he released his victim. Because really, telling the story as it happened, the only impressive thing Brian could be convinced he had done, was shouting loudly enough to make a few dozens of mentally troubled eighteen till thirty year olds fall silent for a few consecutive seconds.

‘They do, but they might be right about your specific case,’ Miss Gaskell said, the smile still not fading from her face. ‘But why don’t you come on in to talk a bit more about that in private?’

Brian still wasn’t a huge fan of the idea of being locked inside a room with a psychiatrist to ask him all they wanted to know about him, but he had started to notice how the people in the hallway were voluntarily eavesdropping on their conversation, so he hoisted himself out of the chair he had planted himself onto earlier and followed his psychiatrist, making sure to properly close the door behind him to prevent any eavesdroppers from hearing them out.

When he slowly let go of the door handle and allowed himself to peer around the room, Brian was surprised by the cosiness of the room. Whereas the office of his previous psychiatrist had been pained all dark grey and contained barely anything more than a reclining sofa for him to lie on and a chair for Doctor Sumner to sit on, completely à la Sigmund Freud, the room he had just stepped into was very warm and inviting. The crisp white walls were the only aspect that really reminded Brian of the psychiatric atmosphere they were in; the wooden desk with green chairs at either side of it, the red chairs in the corner of the room, the sunflower-shaped carpet on the floor, the bookcase packed with colourful covers, and the pin-up boards containing dozens of pictures, letters, and leaflets on the walls, reminded him of the average hippie teenage girl room more than it made him think of a medical office. His psychiatrist was still young - he estimated she could barely be older than somewhere in her mid-twenties - so the youthful interior fit her, but he had not expected a medical official to bring their personal style into their work as much as she apparently had.

‘I know, there’s a lot going on here,’ he heard her say, obviously having noticed his rather shameless staring. ‘If it’s making you uncomfortable, I can ask my co-worker if we can borrow her room,’ Miss Gaskell offered while making her way to her desk. Brian, still kind of overwhelmed by the presence of all the decoration and nearly playful furniture, did not manage to tear his eyes away from the bookcase while he shook his head absent-mindedly.

‘No, it’s fine. I just… Didn’t expect it,’ Brian admitted a bit stiffly, not really knowing how to react to his surroundings. He had prepared himself to be swallowed into yet another grey, sterile looking office like the ones he had spent hours in with his previous psychiatrist, and the fact that this room was much the opposite of it, made him a bit uncomfortable. He chided himself for always being so uneasy no matter what the situation brought him, and was glad that his psychiatrist soon brought the mind of the matter.

‘Most people don’t,’ she smiled ever-kindly, opening the drawer of her desk and flicking through the contents of it. ‘Choose a spot, make yourself comfortable. Would you like something to drink?’

‘Maybe some water?’ Brian half-asked, half-said, suddenly feeling how dry his throat had gotten overtime. Noticing he was still standing next to the door, he carefully walked towards the two red velvet chairs Miss Gaskell had pointed to for the pair of them to sit on. Brian got down on the first chair he reached, feeling too shaky to place any more steps than just the dozen he had done to walk from one side of the room to the others. No matter how cosy the place was, he still felt trapped, enclosed; it was as if the walls were closing in on him, growing smaller with every second he spent inside of the room that despite its respectable size felt claustrophobically small to him.

‘Here you go,’ the woman said when she had poured the both of them a glass of water, and Brian was glad to find that she placed the glass on the side table between their chairs instead of handing it to him directly; his fingers were too shaky to hold onto anything right now, especially something as fragile as a glass filled with liquid.

‘Thank you, Miss Gaskell,’ Brian said, immediately noticing how awkward he sounded. It was like being back in high school, where you called your teachers and superiors by their formal title and last name to emphasise the distance between staff and students. He was glad that his psychiatrist seemed to think it just as awkward as he did, because she was quick to correct him.

‘You can call me Sarah. I’m not ancient yet,’ she said before putting down her own glass and sitting down on the chair across from Brian. Once she had positioned herself, she asked him: ‘Can I also call you by your first name?’

‘Please,’ Brian said, finding himself relieved she would not address him as Mister May any longer - he, after all, was probably even younger than she was. ‘It’s Brian,’ he clarified, even though he was sure she already knew; after all, it had been scribbled down in capital letters on the folder lying on her lap.

‘Thank you,’ she said, also seeming to be glad they could leave the unnecessary formality behind them. ‘So Brian, let’s get started,’ she said, pulling out the clipboard and pencil she had collected from one of the drawers of her desk. ‘Normally I would begin with some introduction, but I think that would take away from the heroic deed you performed yesterday.’

 _Oh Lord, there we go already,_ Brian found himself thinking, having to oppress the tendency to sigh out loud. He knew the topic of him having jumped in on an act of violence was going to be brought up sooner or later, but did it really have to be the opening of their very first session? Could they not slowly ease into this instead of jumping at the thing he regretted having done more with every single mention, every single stare, every single time someone called him a hero for it when all it made him want to do was disappear?

‘I would hardly call it heroic,’ Brian told Sarah quietly, staring at the red nail polish of her fingertips when she scribbled down the first words of what he expected to turn into an entire essay by the time he would walk out of this office again in an hour or so.

‘Wouldn’t you?’ Sarah asked him with an eyebrow cocked at him. ‘Everyone I’ve heard about it, called you a hero, a saviour, a saint even,’ she told him, sounding very much like she wanted to convince him of these words when bringing them up. Brian, however, was not having any of it.

‘I’m afraid they do,’ Brian replied calmly. ‘But I’m not ‘everybody’,’ he told her, but he was not sure if she was still listening to this addition to his sentence; she already seemed to have latched on the first sentence he had spoken.

‘You’re _afraid_ they do,’ Sarah repeated his words, quickly scribbling the words down on the paper in her lap when she did. ‘Interesting choice of words. Why are you afraid they see you as a hero?’

‘Eh, I think I used that more as an expression,’ Brian said. ‘You know, ‘I’m afraid’ in the sense of… you know, ‘I think’… That’s a thing people do, right?’ he asked, suddenly unsure about the use of basic phrases in the English language under the watchful eyes of his superior.

‘They do, but I’m not convinced you did it purely for that reason. You truly seem to be afraid people see you as a hero,’ Sarah told him, her eyes locked with Brian’s somewhat afraid ones while she gave him her analysis of his behaviour. Brian, feeling awkward by the way Sarah seemed to stare right into his soul, reached over to pick up his glass of water. Not only did he feel like he could need a sip of it for the lingering dryness of his throat, but he also needed something to distract himself with, to toy around with, so he did not have to mind Sarah and her dark brown eyes.

‘Perhaps,’ he eventually managed to utter once he had put the glass down on the side table again. He hoped for a second of rest, but it seemed like this had been too much to ask for, because Sarah immediately fired a next question at him.

‘Why do you think you’re afraid of people seeing you as a hero? Of people looking up to you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Brian shrugged after an awkwardly long pause, not daring to face the woman in front of him when he did so. He knew it was a terribly lame reply, but really, he was not in the mood to go into the whole situation of yesterday at the moment, let alone psychoanalysing what his motives had been and how the action was making him feel and how it confirmed to his diagnosis, or whatever Sarah was planning to do with the answers she wanted him to give to the question she had asked him. Or course he had somewhat of an answer to her question; he knew just about what was making him feel uncomfortable when people looked up to him, or when a large amount of people suddenly turned to focus on him, but he did not feel like sharing this with someone he had only known for about a day. Unfortunately for him though, it was the very _profession_ of this aforementioned person to find out what was going on inside his head and what drove him to do or not to do certain things, and she wasn’t taking ‘I don’t know’ for an answer without putting up a fight first, as it was.

‘I think you must have an idea deep inside,’ Sarah said, and even though she still smiled, Brian could swear he heard a touch of reproach in her voice for him not speaking his mind to her right away. ‘Give yourself a second to think about it if it doesn’t come to you immediately.’

Silence filled the room, and Brian felt utterly self-conscious under the staring eyes of the woman sitting across from him. He knew he had brought the current awkwardness upon himself by not having owned up to her what she wanted to hear right away, but really, could she not see he did not like talking about himself, especially not when it came to other people praising him when all he thought he deserved was a six inch deep hole in the earth?

‘I think I’m afraid of people forming… expectations of me?’ Brian eventually answered. His answer came more as a question than as a statement, but when Sarah, pencil and paper at her fingertips, nodded to confirm that he was getting somewhere, he added a bit more confidently: ‘Because when I did… that, whatever I did yesterday, they’ll expect me to be… I don’t know, brave or something?’ Another nod. ‘While I’m just about the opposite of that. It’s like… they expect me to be brave now, and I know I’ll disappoint them.’

‘Why do you think you’ll disappoint them?’ Sarah asked him - she did not look at him this time, too busy writing down all Brian had just told her.

‘Because I’m like the biggest coward to ever have walked the planet,’ Brian muttered, fiddling with the sleeve of his shirt but being careful not to lift it up to the level where Sarah would be able to see his scars and the other irregularities displayed on his skin.

‘A coward?’ Sarah said, the cocked eyebrow back in full force again. ‘Do you think a coward would have done what you did yesterday? Jumping in between a group of people assaulting someone vulnerable and risking his own safety?’

It was a rhetorical question, Brian realised that, but he still managed to negate it. ‘That had nothing to do with bravery,’ he denied, even though he already realised he was not going to win this confrontation in the end.

‘If not out of bravery, then where did your action come from?’ Sarah asked.

‘Just… Humanity? Common decency?’ Brian said hesitantly. He could hear in his own voice that he did not sound too convinced of himself, and it therefore did not surprise him that his answer did not manage to convince Sarah either.

‘There were at least twenty people standing around while this scene was going on, Brian. Does that mean all of those people are inherently bad and don’t have any form of common decency?’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Brian defended himself instantly. ‘Them not stepping up against violent people like Drew and his people does not prove they’re weak, just like me stepping up doesn’t prove anything about my implied bravery, he reasoned.

Sarah, who took a moment to change her position in the chair she was sitting on, wrote his words down before she replied. ‘So, let’s turn this around. Let’s say, you were in the situation of the boy you helped… His name was Jimmy, right?’ she asked, and when Brian nodded, she continued: ‘If you were in Jimmy’s place, you were being abused by multiple men, and one boy stands up for you and risks his own safety while doing so, would you not think of that person as being brave?’

Brian, knowing Sarah had got him there, cast his eyes down to his fingers. He was lazily trailing them along the arm of the chair, drawing patterns onto the velvet surface in an attempt to distract himself from the current conversation. He knew he could not back out of it forever, he knew he had to answer Sarah - who was looking at him rather intensely - sooner or later, but God, this entire session was just too much confrontation for him. He had been pulled through worse, he was aware of that, but the build-up of factors working against him at the moment was simply becoming too much for him to handle this session right now. Having been dropped off at this mental institution, not being allowed to be in touch with anyone outside the four walls of this building, having put himself in the face of danger by standing up against what turned out to be a dangerously hostile clan, the feeling he did not fit in at this place at all, the fear of never being released from here if he did not get better soon enough… Everything was becoming too much for him, and Brian had already forgotten the question Sarah had asked him in the chaos that was his mind at the moment when she reminded him he still had to answer her question.

‘Would you not think of them as brave, Brian? If someone else would have stepped up for you instead?’ Sarah asked, and Brian looked at her with an empty, lost expression.

‘I… guess it would be brave. If they did it for me, I mean,’ Brian added instantly. ‘But for me… For me it’s different. It wasn’t brave of me to do that, it was…’ Brian made a vague gesture with his hand, and when he realised that Sarah - understandably - did not get the meaning behind it, he simply said: ‘it’s just different when it comes to me.’

‘But why?’ Sarah asked him, and Brian added the seriousness of her dark eyes to the list of things that were currently making it impossible for him to function in this conversation. ‘Why is it any different for you?’

‘Because… I don’t know,’ Brian sighed, and this time he meant it. This time he was not trying to hold anything back from his psychiatrist; he really had no explanation as to why he had such different standards when it came to himself compared to how he thought of other people. Why he hated himself for the mistakes that he would not even notice in others, why he wanted to jump off a cliff whenever he stumbled over his words when he wouldn’t skip a beat if someone else would, why he thought he deserved to die simply for being alive while he always attempted - as far as his depression allowed him - to see the best in other people. He did not have an answer, and was therefore glad that Sarah came up for an answer for him.

‘I believe you’re being terribly hard on yourself, Brian, aren’t you?’ Sarah asked softly, and Brian, still facing down, carefully nodded to confirm her assumption. ‘You would give your life for others, but you don’t even think you deserve the daylight in your eyes yourself,’ Sarah added to this. Brian, by now burying his face in his hands, could again do nothing but nod in agreement. Sarah was right, all she was saying, guessing, and implying was right; he had not thought of himself as worthy or deserving to live since as long as he could remember, and more than that, he had no idea how to go back to a stage where he would not hate himself for the mere fact that he existed.

Sarah, probably understanding he could not speak at the moment, decided to take the lead over the conversation again. ‘You don’t give yourself nearly enough credit for the things you do, Brian. When you stepped in to save Jimmy from assault, you were being extremely brave. To put yourself out there on your second day at a new place and establish yourself as someone who will not allow abuse and bullying… That is the definition of bravery and courage, Brian, both when it applies to you or to anyone else,’ she speeched. Then, after having given him a moment to let her work sink in, she moved a bit closer to him and asked: ‘Will you look me in the eyes, Brian?’

Brian hesitated, but did as she said either way. He sniffed softly and removed his hands from his eyes. He found himself hoping the tears did not show too much, even though he realised that Sarah must have seen plenty of them as part of her job, and that she would be the last one to judge him for it; rather, she looked like she embraced the fact that he was letting his walls down, be it only for an inch at the time.

‘I know I can’t make you believe you deserve so much more than you give yourself credit for all in one session, but I want you to know that what you did yesterday was brave, okay?’ Brian, wiping along his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt, nodded somewhat hesitantly to her request. ‘Promise me you’ll think of it as brave. Even though you might not think of yourself as a brave person in general, allow yourself to think of this one action in particular to be an act of bravery.’

‘I’ll try,’ Brian sniffed, which was the best promise he could make at this particular point in time; trying to see his own value really was all he could do, and he was glad to find that Sarah seemed to understand that too, and did not make him swear an oath upon the Bible or any other kind of holy object or entity to make him promise he’d try to see his own worth. ‘It’s just… It’s hard,’ he squeaked, catching a tear that was making its way down his cheek with the sleeve of his shirt and wiping it away.

‘I know it is. Self-esteem and self-appreciation is hard. That’s why we’re going to work on it - that’s what you’re here for, after all,’ she told him with a smile, and even though Brian did not like to be reminded of having been left behind at this Godawful institution by his parents and former psychiatrist, he felt a vague notion he thought he might be best able to describe as ‘hope’, hope that he might, after all, recover at this place to a certain degree. Enough to at least be able to live with himself again.

Throughout the rest of the session - which Brian found to still take more than fifty minutes when this initial opening topic had passed - Brian found himself remaining hesitant and unwilling to talk about most of the topics Sarah proposed, such as diving deeper into his thoughts and motives surrounding having stood up for Jimmy, his admission to Queen Mary’s, and his diagnosis. It was not Sarah’s fault; she was nice enough as a person, but in their current relation she was a psychiatrist, and Brian could not shake off the feeling that he had to remain careful around psychiatrists, always taking note of what they wrote down about you and what they might do with this information. Luckily she seemed to understand most of his reticence, but as it was her job, she pushed him into talking things he would rather not discuss with anyone. He talked to her, surely, but he remained constantly on the lookout, and she more often had to drag answers to her questions out of him rather than that he would voluntarily give her the information that she was looking for.

For this reason, the conversation felt rather tensed and not at all natural; many awkward pauses and moments of silent reflection fell in between their words, and the session itself seemed to take hours even though Brian knew it could impossibly last longer than the sixty minutes that had been planned for him, given that someone new was waiting to be attended by Sarah after him. By the time this moment arrived and she finally dismissed him, Brian was emotionally exhausted and felt so sick with nervousness and unease that he hardly managed to get up from his chair. He politely said his goodbyes to Sarah, felt even worse when he heard he would have to show up at the same time and same place in a matter of two days, before parting from her and letting the next patient into the room he was glad to finally leave behind.

The moment the door closed behind him, Brian got down on the chair standing next to it to give himself a moment of rest. He felt light-headed and nauseous, and the fact that Freddie was nowhere to be seen, was not exactly easing any of these feelings. No matter what Sarah had told him, he still felt terribly uneasy walking around this place alone now that people either saw him as a hero or as someone to take revenge on. He had been so relieved when Freddie had proposed to drop him off and pick him up again, and not having him here was adding up to the pile of reasons for Brian to feel nervous. Had Freddie forgotten about his promise, or was something holding him up? What if one of the enemies he had made yesterday had taken onto Freddie, what if someone was currently pulling him through the same abuse as they had done to Jimmy the day before?

Just the thought of the possibility of something having happened to his roommate was bad enough to make Brian feel like he was going to throw up. In an attempt to calm himself down - both mentally and physically - he placed his head between his knees and covered his face with his hands, like he had done inside Sarah’s office _. Calm down. No one is out to get Freddie,_ he tried to tell himself, but he was not convinced of his own words until, maybe a minute after he had started trying to soothe himself, footsteps in the hallway were audible and  familiar voice called out to him.

‘There you are!’ Freddie exclaimed into the empty space of the corridor, and when Brian removed his hands from his face to see if it indeed was the person he was expecting it to be, he saw his roommate running up to him; that was, if you could call the shiftless way he was hauling his malnourished body across the hallway ‘running’. Brian wanted to tell him to slow it down, to just walk and prevent himself from getting a heart attack, but he could not speak for a moment out of relief that his roommate had arrived at the office, alive and well (as well as he had left him behind a little over an hour ago, that was), for the love of God.

‘Sorry I’m late, Roger was being difficult…’ Freddie explained in a half-pant without further diving into what his boyfriend had been up to this time. Brian was unsure if it was because he did not wish to share, or because something else had obviously caught his attention. ‘My Lord, you look terribly pale! Are you okay?’ Freddie exclaimed at the sight of him, placing his hand across Brian’s forehead the moment he had run up to him closely enough to touch him.

The feeling of Freddie’s cool hand across his forehead sure felt nice, but Brian knew there was nothing physically wrong with him - it was just his anxiety that caused him to look white as a sheet and like he was about to throw up at the moment.

‘No, I’m fine. Just… It was quite a confrontation,’ Brian mumbled, head still spinning with all the questions she had asked and all the topics she had been wanting to discuss: his youth, his life outside this institution, his parents having sent him here, him dropping out of university, his previous mental health care experiences, his relatively unknown diagnosis, his time at Queen Mary’s so far… It had all been a lot to deal with, especially when considering that he did not want to talk about at least half of the aforementioned subjects.

‘God, I don’t hope Sarah was too harsh on you, now was she?’ Freddie asked while looking at the door behind which the psychiatrist had disappeared a moment before, but Brian denied the claim.

‘It was not just her, it was more that she… confronted me with myself,’ Brian blushed, and he could see from the corners of his eyes that Freddie smiled.

‘That’s the entire point of therapy, love,’ he said, removing his hand from Brian’s forehead.

‘Doesn’t mean I have to like it,’ Brian muttered. He looked up at his roommate to see him flash him a bit of a pitiful smile, as if Freddie knew how painful confrontation could be at times and wished he could change it for Brian.

‘I don’t think I know anyone who particularly likes having others pry into their minds. But that’s what it takes to get out of this place, so we all just roll with it,’ Freddie told him, reminding Brian of the things John had told him the day before when he had ran out of the therapy session.

_The only way to get out of this place is by doing what people expect you to do._

‘You must be right,’ Brian answered, more to John’s words than to those of Freddie. Freddie was of course not aware of this, and nearly cheerfully pulled him off the chair to take him with him to the next activity on the schedule.

‘How I love to hear the sound of that,’ Freddie said once he had managed to haul a begrudging Brian off the chair. ‘Now, it’s been half past five already, so we’d better move on if we want to get some dinner,’ Freddie said, hooking his arm through Brian’s and tugging him towards the direction of the main hallway. Brian figured that his roommate must have noticed the confusion on his face when he heard that the anorexic boy was concerned about missing out on dinner, for he quickly added an explanation to his suddenly rushy behaviour: ‘Don’t get your hopes up, I’m not thinking of laying hold of half of the food. But it’s Wednesday, so that means they’ve got this big bowl of salad. And if I’m early, I can still pick out the pieces of lettuce that haven’t been contaminated with oil or dressing or anything the like,’ he said, pulling a face while the pair of them moved down the hallways. ‘Look, a hundred gram of lettuce only contains sixteen calories and no fat, but when you add a spoonful of dressing to it, that’s gonna add forty calories and three and a half grams of fat! Can you imagine people spoiling their food like that?’

Brian looked a bit quizzical; he had heard of calories and knew a bit of how they worked, but that was just about it.  From the context he could conclude that the dressing Freddie was talking of contained a lot of calories in his perspective, but who on earth would eat a bunch of raw lettuce without anything to add a bit of flavour to it?

The answer to this question obviously was Freddie, who passionately continued talking about calories while he navigated the pair of them back to the bedroom. ‘It’s just as stupid as drinking tea or coffee and adding all kinds of nonsense to it. Tea and coffee contain nothing in terms of calories, sugar, or fat, but then you throw in a sugar cube and that’s gonna make sixteen calories. That’s the same amount of calories as a hundred grams of lettuce! Why would anyone be so stupid?’

Freddie rambled on and pulled out even more numbers about food he considered to be worth ‘wasting his daily calories on’ and foods he could not imagine anyone to ever have invented, let alone eat. Brian tried his best not to pay too much attention to it - both because he had no idea what to say in order not to make Freddie’s calorie-counting processes even worse than they already seemed to be, and more than that, he felt nauseous at just the thought of food. He knew that dinner was coming up, but really, he feared he would throw up if he was to be standing face in face with any kind of the foods Freddie was talking of, being it the donuts he condemned or the peeled cucumber he praised for being so low in calories.

‘…So really, the number one tip I could give anyone would be to always peel food, be it apples, pear, cucumber. You should also do this to bread; you’d be surprised to hear how much of the calories of a slice of bread are in the crusts,’ Freddie lectured Brian, before he at last seemed to notice whose mental absence. ‘Brian, dear, are you okay? You seem even paler than before.’

‘I feel nauseous,’ Brian said, swallowing painfully. ‘I feel like I’m going to throw up.’

Freddie, stopping him in the middle of the hallway, placed both hands on Brian’s shoulders and looked at him intensely. ‘Breathe deeply. Our room is just upstairs and around the swing doors. Do you think you can make that?’

Brian nodded softly to this question, but then added: ‘But dinner… I really think I’ll be sick if I have to eat something now.’

‘It’s okay, you can stay in our room. I’ll sign in for you. No one apart from Nolan and Sarah know you here - they probably won’t even notice,’ Freddie said, which dimly left Brian to wonder how big the chances were that they would notice, and more than this, what would happen to him if they found out his roommate had falsely signed him up for a round of dinner he had never attended. However, he felt too awful and nauseous to give it more than just a few seconds of his thought, before he had to focus on breathing in and out carefully in an attempt not to throw up.

Freddie supported him and escorted him to the bedroom, where he helped Brian get down on his bed and handed him a glass - a plastic cup, rather, given that they were not allowed to own glassware in their room. By the time Brian had managed to sit up and gratefully take the glass from Freddie’s hands, still no one had reacted to the fact that the both of them had entered the room in the state that they had. Brian had not expected anything else from John, who was lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, but to find Roger doing the exact same was remarkable to say at the very least.

‘Anyone either awake or alive here?’ Freddie called out to the other two, receiving a chuckle from John and somewhat of a groan from Roger in reply. ‘It’s almost dinner time. Are the both of you coming up?’

‘Do we really have to?’ someone asked, and Brian was surprised to find that this question did not come from John but from Roger. Whereas John swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stretched out his arms, Roger curled up beneath his bedsheets and did not seem willing to get up.

‘Yes, we do. Come on, out of bed. Even John’s already gotten up!’ Freddie told his boyfriend, who turned around to face the other way when the older man walked over and gave a tug at his blankets.

‘Freddie…’ Roger whined when his partner continued trying to pull the blankets off his body.

‘Yes, you’re getting up right now. I can’t believe _I_ have to convince _you_ to go to dinner,’ Freddie said, obviously referring to the fact that it was usually Roger who would have to drag him out of the room and into the canteen to make sure Freddie would get a minimum of nutritious intake every day.

‘I’m really not hungry…’ Roger complained in another attempt to be left alone, but Freddie wasn’t having any of it.

‘Neither am I, but do you see me complaining?’ Freddie asked, which earned him an angry look from his partner, who probably realised he was not going to win this battle. ‘Come on, get up and leave. Brian needs a bit of rest,’ Freddie said, by now simply placing his hands under Roger’s armpits and trying to lift him up into a sitting position. It was not so much the little power Freddie had left in his malnourished body that made Roger sit up in bed at last; it was the words he spoke that made the blond boy sit up all at once and stare at his partner with an angry glare.

‘Why doesn’t Brian have to go?’ Roger asked indignantly.

‘God, Roger, why are you being so difficult? Brian’s ill,’ Freddie said, giving a short glance in the direction of their roommate, whose complexion still resembled the colour of a sheet. ‘I’ll sign up his name for him.’

‘Why won’t you do that for me then?’ Roger whined.

‘Because they’ll notice your absence the second they miss a small blond boy trying to start a food fight while waiting in line for the buffet, darling,’ Freddie replied half-mockingly half-endearingly, running a hand through Roger’s messy tresses.

‘That happened only twice,’ Roger muttered, but his resistance seemed to have weakened enough for him not to fight back too much anymore when Freddie pulled the blankets off his body.

‘ _Thrice_ ,’ someone piped up from the other side of the room; it was John, who looked like he was more than ready to get it over with. ‘Now get up or we’ll have to sit on the floor.’

It was impressive to see, really, how one mildly irritated sentence coming from their quietest roommate could activate Roger into getting up from the bed and, be it unwillingly, follow the others out of the room. Freddie lingered in the opening of the door for a moment to ask Brian if they needed to smuggle some food with them for him to eat later that evening - the thought of which alone already made Brian sick - and promised they’d be back in half an hour. Then the door was closed behind him, leaving Brian on his own in the suddenly empty room.

Brian sighed deeply when the closing door announced that he really had the room all for himself; he had not imagined this moment to be happening anywhere soon, if ever at all. Sharing a room with three other people meant there was always someone around - certainly with John lying in bed all day and Freddie buzzing around the rest of them in an attempt to make them get up and do things. It was not that Brian particularly minded either of them; they were nice people, all three of them, but he just felt like he needed to be alone at times like these. He needed some time to think about the therapy session he had been pulled through; how Sarah had tried to drag whatever information she could possibly gather about him out of him, how she had tried to convince him he had been brave when standing up for Jimmy, tried to convince him he was worth so much more than he gave himself credit for, while all speaking of his life so far had made him want to do was jump out of a window. Being confronted with the fact that he had dropped out of university, that his parents had sent him away, that he had lost touch with most of his friends and relatives and others when the depths of his depression had made it impossible for him to do anything more than sit in his room and cry, did not at all make Brian feel like he was brave, like he deserved credit for the things he did and stood for - it made him believe he deserved to die.

A terrible headache had grown over him, making Brian cover his eyes with his hands to block out the overhead lighting of the bedroom. He wanted to shut the light off and submerge both the room and himself in darkness, but for that to happen, he knew he had to get up from the bed and switch off the light with the switch next to the door. Getting up was not something he was particularly excited about, but the alternative - lying in bed with the light burning down on him like the sun in the Sahara desert - did not seem desirable either, so he convinced himself to get out of bed and switch off the lighting. Perhaps he could fill his almost empty cup with some more water of the sink; and perhaps, if he was lucky, there would be an aspirin or something similar to it in the small cabinet below the sink.

Brian swung his legs over and awkwardly climbed out of bed. He felt his entire body and mind protest when he did - his legs were shaky and his vision blurred - but he carried through, carefully walking towards the sink. Avoiding his own face in the mirror above it, he filled his plastic cup with water, before he crouched down on the floor and opened the closet below the sink. It was surprisingly empty, even though Brian knew this should not come as a surprise to him; they were not allowed to keep anything here, no razors, tweezers, scissors, medicines, or any other items he used to consider normal facilities back at home. All this cabinet contained was a pile of towels, a glass container that he assumed was Freddie’s foundation, and a few unbranded bottles of shampoo and body wash which looked like refills to Brian. They were probably given soap by the staff of Queen Mary’s to prevent people from smuggling in harmful substances, Brian reasoned while he tried not to trash through the contents of the cabinet in his frantic search for something, anything to relief his headache with. Unfortunately for him, all he could find hidden between the pile of towels was a handful of condoms, which he decided he’d rather forget about as soon as possible. He did not know what exactly Freddie and Roger were up to in their spare time, and he’d rather not find out either.

Brian felt his headache welling up again when he got up from the floor, and he decided he’d better get back into bed. Picking up his cup of water from the sink and shutting off the light, he stumbled back to his bed and lied down on it again. He did not bother to pull the blankets over his body; he just lied back, hands under the back of his head and stared at the ceiling above him. After no more than a minute of slowly in- and exhaling, he found himself wondering how on earth John could pull himself through the days this way, just lying in bed and staring at whatever it was before his eyes. It was too boring to describe, and that sure meant something coming from _him_ , who could lie on his bed and absent-mindedly pluck the same guitar string for hours in a row without ever really listening to what it was that he was doing,

Then again, Brian did have to admit that staring at your surroundings sure was a calming activity. There was nothing you had to do, nothing you had to think about, worry about - just look at the colour of the ceiling, as far as he could see that in the room that had been largely darkened since the moment he had shut off the lights. It was amazingly quiet and peaceful in the room, and Brian suddenly noticed how tired he was after having kept up with another day of lining up for medicines, having meals with two hundred others, gathering for group therapy, individual therapy, trying to avoid the stares and whispers of all the people who had somehow been informed of how he had challenged Drew and his clan the other day. Keeping up with life at this place was tiring, so incredibly tiring, and all Brian really felt like doing, was lie down and fall asleep until all of the madness would have passed. Perhaps, if he would just close him eyes, think of nothing, absolutely nothing…

Brian was unsure for how long he had been asleep when the light was switched on, but he did know that he was awake in a matter of just seconds when multiple pairs of feet thundered through the room and multiple voices shouted at each other for a reason he could not make out in a haze of tiredness that still had him in its grip after his evening nap.

‘I can’t believe you actually did this!’ he heard a voice calling out angrily, and it did not take too long for him to realise that it could be no one else than Freddie. ‘You’ve been clean for a month, how could you even _think_ of ruining it now?!’

‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, I really am, but I just couldn’t… couldn’t resist it any longer,’ someone else replied - sobbed, rather. Brian frowned a bit, wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve, and looked at the direction of which the sound was coming. Two men were standing in the middle of the room - one of them Freddie, and the person he had just shouted at was Roger, who was helplessly trying to wipe away the tears that kept flowing while his partner gave him a scolding for a reason Brian could still not understand.

‘What did you…’ he attempted, but his voice was easily overpowered by that of Freddie; it did not seem like anyone had even noticed that he had made an attempt at speaking up.

‘You should have told me!’ Freddie’s voice could easily be described as yelling, and Brian could swear he saw Roger take a step back at the harshness of it; ether it was that, or it had something to do with the state he was in at the moment. He had seemed tired the moment Freddie had dragged him out of bed before they had left for dinner, but right now, he looked outright _exhausted_ to Brian; his face was pale, his eyes red and swollen, and his body was shaking all over. ‘I could have distracted you! Helped you stay off it-’

‘You don’t understand!’ Roger interrupted his boyfriend mid-sentence, which effectively shut Freddie up for a moment. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be addicted. You don’t know what it’s- it’s like to need something so badly that not getting it makes you feel sick, and-‘

‘Oh, and now you’ve gotten it you’re not feeling sick? Look what you’ve done to yourself!’ Freddie cried out at his boyfriend, who by now no longer seemed to be able to hold up whatever he previously had been trying to hold up, Roger quite literally sank to his knees right in the middle of the room, making Brian - who still had no idea what was happening - clamp a hand over his mouth as he watched his roommate cry his heart out on the floor.

‘Roger…’ Brian whispered, even though he knew no one could hear him anyway now that Roger’s crying was overpowering all other sounds in the room, including that of Freddie attempting to hush him and John emitting a loud sigh as he covered his face with his hands, obviously not exactly pleased with whatever had happened during dinner.

‘I’m so… s-so sorry,’ Roger squeaked out between broken sobs. The sight of it was enough to break Brian’s heart; he wished he could get up and comfort Roger, hug him, tell him that whatever had happened was alright and that everything was going to be fine, but he found himself unable to move in his state of shock. Luckily for him, it was Freddie who took on the task of comforting Roger. He crouched down next to Roger, placed one hand on Roger’s shoulder and used the other to wipe away a line of tears from his boyfriend’s cheek, and sighed softly when he gave up on trying to make Roger aware of his mistakes the hard way. He instead used a softer voice to reprove him with from now of, probably sensing that Roger would suffer from an actual nervous breakdown if he did not treat him with care from now off.

‘You shouldn’t say sorry to anyone else than yourself, dear. You’re gonna be the one dealing with the side effects of it all over again,’ Freddie reminded him softly, to which Roger nodded ashamedly.

‘What is… which side effects?’ Brian asked in a final attempt to be informed of what on earth was happening right before his eyes, and it was John who against all odds finally helped him making sense out of Roger having broken down on the floor in front of them.

‘Roger somehow managed to get his hands on a shot of heroin yesterday. _Again_ ,’ John answered curtly from the bed he had gotten down on the moment he had returned to the room, sounding very much like he had been annoyed by the behaviour of his roommate. Most of all, he sounded as if he was tired, really, _really_ tired of the bullshit Roger was pulling them through at the moment. Brian, however, had never experienced Roger (or anyone else, for that matter) having laid his hands on heroin and then cold turkey recover from it again, if what he thought was happening to Roger now was correct. Experiencing this was completely new to Brian, who hoped the others knew how to handle this kind of situation now that it had apparently happened many times before, since he sure as hell had no idea what to do with someone who had just engaged in hard drugs.

‘Heroin?’ Brian repeated shakily. ‘Where did he…’

‘God only knows, he wouldn’t tell us,’ John grumbled, which pulled a reaction from Roger, who - though not facing him - still managed to lash out at him.

‘You know we can’t speak about it in public! What if someone wo-ould overhear us?’ he told him, which did not have the effect that Roger had probably desired; John was no longer listening to him, and  it earned him another scolding from Freddie, who saw a way to turn his comment into a lecture of how irresponsible Roger had been behaving by having taken on heroin.

‘Oh yeah, sure, the risk of someone hearing us and snitching sure is the biggest risk now that you’re in full cold turkey mode! It’s a miracle no one of the staff came noticed you were shaking all over and that your pupils are larger than that of a cat at night!’ Freddie threw at him. The last comment might have been funny another time, another place, if the fear of someone discovering Roger’s slip into his old habits had not been terrorising the four of them.

‘Do you think they’ll find out?’ Brian asked softly, flashing a concerned look at Roger, whose body indeed was shaking all over and whose eyes by now were bloodshot either from having cried or from whatever kind of things the lack of heroin was doing to his body.

‘Not if we keep him out of the spotlights. He doesn’t have to go and pick up any medicines tonight, and if they don’t call for random drug testing any of these days…’ Freddie said pensively, and Brian pretended like he had totally been informed about the presence of ‘random drug tests’ that were apparently carried out at this place every now and then. ‘And if I don’t have to call someone in in the middle of the night because you’re vomiting all over the place,’ Freddie added, leaving Brian to wonder if this was supposed to be a warning or a reminder of what had happened last time Roger had gotten himself in a similar situation. He figured it was a combination of both; just hearing Freddie say this was all that was needed to bring the tears back to Roger’s eyes and make him cling onto his partner.

‘Please don’t tell anyone, Freddie, I- I beg you,’ Roger whimpered, which was a sight so painful Brian had to look away for a moment. ‘If they find out I used they’ll send me to the isolation cells. Please, I… I can’t go through that again,’ Roger sniffed. While he was taken into Freddie’s arms and comforted by him, Brian was left to wonder what other kind of unpleasant surprises this mental institution harboured. Within all of five minutes, he had discovered they both ran random drug tests and possessed isolation cells for those they deemed unmanageable for the moment. What more was to come, a torture cell? Corporal punishment? Public executions?

‘I won’t. Of course I won’t do that to you,’ Freddie promised in an attempt to hush his partner. ‘I won’t tell anyone and neither will the rest of us,’ he said in a louder voice, obviously trying to have John and Brian join in on his claim. Out of the two boys, who so far had managed to largely stay out of the whole business, Brian was the first to agree; John had to be personally called out before he allowed Roger a grumpy ‘I won’t snitch on you’, after which he turned to his back to let the rest know he wanted to be left alone.

With everyone’s agreement not to inform the staff about the situation, Freddie carefully detached himself from Roger’s body and placed his hands on whose shoulders. Urging him to look at him, Freddie told him: ‘None of us will betray you, Roger. But you’re getting the _hell_ into bed right now and sweat out this fever or whatever it is that you’re suffering from.’ Roger nodded obediently to Freddie’s demand. Brian was sure he was not exactly excited about being tossed into bed at a quarter to seven in the evening, but Roger at the same time probably must have realised that he was not the one to issue the demands at the moment. Freddie, seeming to be satisfied with his obedience, helped Roger off the floor and added: ‘And tomorrow you’re going to all your group meetings and the like and pretend like there’s nothing going on, because if you let it show, you know they’ll examine you and then you’ll surely end up in isolation. And you know I can’t miss you again for that long,’ he added softly, which made Roger emit a last sob and which made Brian wonder what on _earth_ had happened before he had entered Queen Mary’s - and, even more than that, what on _earth_ was yet to come during his presence.

‘I know,’ Roger whispered. ‘Neither can I.’

They shared a bony hug between the pair of them, a clash of ribs and willowy thin arms wrapping themselves around the other’s torsos, until Freddie eventually broke them apart. ‘Well then. Get changed and into bed,’ Freddie said, sending Roger off to the bathroom with a smack against the seating of his jeans that might have fitted him a long time ago, before the heroin addiction had drastically decreased the circumference of his waist. Freddie himself followed soon after - probably to make sure no one would take too much note of Roger, because there was no way Roger was going to disobey him now. He left Brian and John alone in a room that was dead silence the moment he closed the door behind him.

‘Isolation cells?’ Brian whispered at no one in particular after a few seconds of silence. He had not expected an answer, especially not since John was the only person left in the room with him, but much to his surprise, the younger man did reply to him.

‘There are a couple of them in the basement. We’re not supposed to know about them,’ John said, turning himself on his back as to be closer to the person he was talking to without actually having to face Brian. ‘They’re forbidden by law - or well, not so much the isolation cells themselves, but the care they give the people there.’

‘Such as?’ Brian said, not entirely sure if he wanted to know the answer to this question at all. The more he came to know about this place, the more he was inclined to jump through one of the barred windows just to be able to escape this hell.

‘Only bringing them food twice a day, letting them stay in there for too long for no good reason… I think Roger actually disappeared into an isolation cell for at least two weeks the last time they found he had been using,’ John said matter-of-factly, while the information he shared with him managed to make Brian shiver to the core. Sure, he had had his moment where he had wished he could be alone in the world, with no one else him to bother him, but at the end of the day, he preferred having others around. Being locked away from society - other patients, rather, since the core of them being here was that they were locked away from the rest of society at Queen Mary’s - for weeks without knowing when you would be allowed to leave your cell again, was something Brian would not wish to happen to his worse enemy.

_Speaking of whom…_

‘Do you think Drew will be at a place like that?’ Brian asked. ‘You know, abusing Jimmy, possessing a knife, pointing it at me…’ he said as to freshen up John’s mind, in case the absent-minded boy had forgotten it already.

‘I think he’ll break Roger’s record of being in those cells for nineteen days straight with ease,’ John chuckled, and even though Brian felt relieved to know that he would not run into Drew anywhere soon, he still felt a bit bad for him; not because he did not think Drew should be punished for the things he had said and done to Jimmy, but because the treatment in isolation cells sounded inhumane to him, even to someone like Drew.

They did not speak to each other after this; a silence lingered in the room, one of which Brian could not judge whether it was a comfortable or an awkward one. The tranquillity was only broken when Roger returned about ten minutes after having left the room, supported by Freddie, who held on to his arm in an attempt to keep him from tumbling over. Brian watched with concern how the blond boy stepped into bed and ad Freddie cover him with the duvets. He seemed sweaty and uncomfortable, even more so than he had already been before. Freddie was strict to him and told him there was no one to blame but himself, but he did soak a washcloth in cold water to press against Roger’s warm forehead and sat at his side while Roger shifted around in bed in an attempt to find a comfortable position for him to lie in and possibly fall asleep in.

Apart from Roger’s mumbling of random requests and complaints concerning his state of being, the room was awkwardly quiet. Freddie tried to soothe Roger’s fever with washcloths and cups of cold water, John was lying in bed and mumbled something to himself with his eyes fixated on the ceiling, and Brian watched the scene while he wondered what to do. He was still worried sick about Roger and could hardly look away from the boy lying in the bed across from his for more than a few seconds, watching his chest heaving up and down, his hands curling up in the bedsheets below him, hear the sound of his coarse coughing filling the room. Brian wished he could do something for him, _anything_ that would make him feel better. The problem was that he had no idea what to do with a heroin addiction, meaning that he had to turn to Freddie to ask what he could mean to Roger at this particular point in time.

‘Is there anything I can do for him? Or for you?’ Brian whispered as he hesitantly walked up to the couple, keeping a respectable distance between him and the bed on which Roger was lying.

‘Perhaps you could trace down and beat up whoever gave him this shot,’ Freddie sighed, turning his glance from his boyfriend to Brian to flash him a wink, just in case he didn’t see he wasn’t being serious. ‘A joke, love. Perhaps you could hold this washcloth under the tap for a moment?’ Freddie said, handing the lukewarm piece of fabric over to Brian, who was surprised by its temperature.

‘This feels warm. How’s he doing?’ Brian asked, letting his concerned eyes travel over Roger’s heaving chest, feverishly red forehead, and eyes that fluttered open and shut.

‘Just a fever. It looks worse than it is. He’ll be having a rough night, but I think he’ll be fine in the morning. And perhaps a rough night is exactly what he needs to be reminded of why he should not be taking heroin anymore, right?’ Freddie said. He pinched Roger’s cheek between a willowy thumb and forefinger, a gesture that made his boyfriend frown and reach out a trembling hand to bat Freddie’s fingers away from his face.

Despite multiple attempts of Freddie to reassure Brian that nothing was seriously wrong with Roger (‘We’ve been here before, it’ll be over in the morning’ ‘I’ll have you know that he loves exaggerating’ ‘It’s exactly what he needs every now and then to be reminded not to do drugs anymore’) Brian could not shake off the feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong with his roommate. Freddie and Roger - and later, when Roger had fallen asleep, only Freddie - had to prevent him from rushing off to the nurse multiple times, as Brian was sure Roger was about to breathe his last breath every time the boy emitted a somewhat worrisome sound. Brian was not sure if Freddie urged him to come with him pick up his doze of evening Zyprexa - which he shortly mentioned was supposed to lessen his obsessive thoughts about eating, or rather, about not eating - because he liked to have company, or because he was afraid Brian would run off to the nurse the moment he left him on his own for a couple of minutes.

Leaving a sleeping Roger to John for the moment, Freddie dragged Brian out of the room and towards the apothecary. Brian was glad to find that it was not as crowded as it generally was in the morning; he did not like crowds, so seeing that there were only a few people lining up for the evening shift of medicines, came as a relief to him. He was, however, eager to get back to Roger as soon as possible; he knew that the chances of something happening to him in the handful of minutes Freddie and he were away were small,  and he knew that they could count on John to help Roger if really necessary, but he still did not like the thought of being away from their room while Roger was sweating out a bad fever in bed.

Luckily, Freddie seemed to think similarly about the situation, and they soon returned to their dorm room. Everything was still in the same state as they had left it behind; Roger was still sleeping and John was still lying in bed, even though he seemed to have picked up a pencil to toy around with in the time they had been gone. They sat in silence for the remainder of the evening, Freddie trying to distract Brian with the newspaper he had picked up somewhere earlier that day while all Brian could do was look at Roger’s every move and every breath in his state of unconsciousness, until a bell ringing at half past nine informed the entire building that it was time to prepare for the night.

Deciding to skip their evening shower both because the bathroom was crowded and because they did not wish to leave Roger alone, the two men were quick to wash up and brush their teeth, before returning to their room. John eventually followed their example of getting up from bed a few minutes before curfew in a successful attempt to escape the presence of as many people as possible. He came back right in time before the second alarm rung, announcing everyone was to stay in their room and not make any sound that could be perceived as disturbing by others.

The previous nights there had not exactly been a rush to get to bed the second the curfew had been applied, but tonight, it seemed like everyone was more than ready to get it over with and get to sleep - everyone apart from Brian, that was. While Freddie crawled into bed next to his already sleeping partner and John discarded his uniform shirt and jeans to the floor to jump into bed for the actual purpose of sleeping this time, Brian found himself sitting at the edge of his mattress in the dark without feeling the urge to go to sleep at all. He was tired, certainly, but he did not feel ready yet to lie back and allow himself to go to sleep. His head was spinning with even more subjects to worry about than he had already had before tonight’s events. It was not just Drew wanting revenge on him, the presence of bullies at this place, having been sent away, not wanting to go back to either individual or group therapy ever again; on top of all of this, there was Roger sweating out the symptoms of a terrible cold turkey, the presence of drug dealers or whatever at Queen Mary’s, the threat of the existence of isolation cells one apparently could be dumped into for weeks at end… Lord, what would happen if someone would find out about Roger’s slip of the rules? What if they ran a random drug test on him and discarded him into isolation for God knew how long? What if the rest of them would be held responsible for knowing about his misstep and not having spoken up?

Brian did not want to, wordlessly told himself he was not going to, but he soon enough found himself quietly crying into the palms of his hands. There was so much going on at this place, so much he could not and did not want to deal with, and it was making him feel sick to the stomach. The thought of Roger falling ill over this stupid heroin incident, the thought of Drew being released from isolation and planning his revenge on him, the idea of not being allowed to leave this place before all parties involved - that was, all psychiatrists and other people thinking they knew what was going on inside his head - thought he was ready to go back to society again… It was all becoming too much for Brian, who tried his best to keep his sobs down in the stillness of the bedroom in which everyone apart from him seemed to have fallen asleep.

After a handful of minutes, Brian eventually managed to pull himself together at least to the degree where he was no longer crying, and he sat down on his bed with his arms wrapped around his knees. He stared at the wooden footboard of the bed, but his eyes soon travelled up to look at Freddie and Roger. Now that his eyes had gotten used to the darkness hanging around the room, he could make out their silhouettes in the darkness. He leant over and carefully switched on the dim light on the nightstand of his bed, which did not do more than change the darkness into semi-darkness, but which did allow him to see more of his roommates. He knew he should feel ashamed for looking at them so shamelessly now that both of them had fallen asleep and were blissfully unaware of his staring, but he could not help it; he felt the urge to check on Roger, whose ragged breathing and irregular coughing broke the silence in the room every now and then. He needed to know if he was okay; if he was not falling even more ill than he had already been ever since dinnertime, if his state did not deteriorate overnight. Even though Brian had hardly managed to get to know him in a matter of three days, he could not bear the thought of something happening to Roger just because he had not kept an eye on him in his state of vulnerability.

Or well, Roger’s state of vulnerability… It was not just the blond boy whose frailty shone in the dim lightning Brian’s nightlight emitted; his partner looked equally bad in the semi-darkness, if not even worse. Brian carefully sat upright to take a good look at the pair of them. Their arms, which had been wrapped around each other’s torsos, looked terribly upsetting for all their own reasons; Freddie because they were so thin Brian was positive he could wrap his thumb and forefinger around it and still have space left, and Roger for the black spots covering the skin close to his elbow, of which Brian could not make out the cause but which did manage to make him shiver to the core. They looked like black bruises, battle wounds, even resembled images of the first stadium of the plague he had seen in his exam class biology book and which he had had trouble putting out of his mind again whenever he thought of them. Whatever was going on on his roommate’s skin, it looked like bad news to Brian, who became more and more tempted to tiptoe out of the room and call in the nurse on the pair of them for a multitude of reasons.

However, as if some kind of invisible force in the universe wanted to prevent him from doing so, distraction from an unexpected source presented itself, making it impossible for Brian to get up and call for help.

‘Can’t sleep?’

Brian almost jumped up when the voice of yet again the last person he would have expected to still be awake, let alone talk to him, called out to him. He swiftly turned around to look at John, whose dark eyes looked straight into his when he faced him. Lying on his side on the bed, John’s expression was entirely flat as he asked the question in a business-like voice. Brian could do nothing but nod as he stared down, wondering how much he must have been blushing now that he had been caught red-handed in the act of staring at their fellow roommates.

‘Not really,’ Brian whispered in reply, facing the other way as he tried to wipe the leftover tears off his cheeks before John would notice them. He already seemed to think of him as a sissy enough as if was; he did not have to see him crying in the middle of the night to confirm his suspicions even more.

‘Can I join you for a moment?’ John then asked, which was yet another surprise to Brian. The fact that John was voluntarily conversing with him was something he still had to get over; having him ask him to come over and sit at his bed was something Brian, who now made a serious task of rubbing all evidence of his previous crying off his face, was something he needed to recover from for a moment. However, he did not seem to be having more than a few seconds to make the decision as John waited for him to answer, so Brian nodded a bit confusedly at his roommate.

‘Sure, I mean… sure,’ he whispered, shifting a bit to the right side of the mattress to make space for John, who batted his own duvets away and sat down on Brian’s bed. Dressed in boxers and a plain white shirt only, Brian could see his bare arms and legs, and he was happy to find that they looked exactly the way limbs were supposed to look - that was they seemed to look normal until Brian remembered the labyrinth of cuts and marks going on on the skin of both his arms, which immediately made him feel queasy the moment he thought of what John must have pulled his body and mind through.

‘So, you couldn’t sleep either?’ John said when he had settled himself on the side of Brian’s mattress, keeping somewhat of a distance to him but yet being very close to him simultaneously.

‘I don’t dare to. I’m afraid that they… could stop breathing any moment or so if I look away,’ Brian whispered with a nod towards the couple lying on the bed across from the one the pair of them were sitting on. Brian knew how stupid he must have been sounding as he revealed this totally illogical thinking pattern; it was like fearing your house would burn down if you went away to work for the day. ‘I mean, I know they won’t die if I don’t look at them, but it’s just…’ he unsuccessfully tried to make sense out of his own rambling.

‘That they look so fragile,’ John finished his sentence for him, and Brian nodded thankfully.  

‘That’s it. They look even more fragile at night, clinging on to each other in the darkness and all…’

‘They look just as fragile during the day, you know. You just can’t see it when they’re wearing their uniform,’ John said, and Brian found it hard to judge if he was making fun of him for thinking they looked so much more breakable during the night than during the day, or if he tried to console him by telling him Roger and Freddie were fragile at every point in time, which might be even worse of a thought to Brian.

‘I know, but that’s the thing. I can’t see it at daytime, and now… They look so exposed, with their arms visible and everything…’ Brian said with a vague gesture of his hand towards the couple.

‘I know, but don’t we all? The four of us?’ John paused for a moment, before he described the situation, as if Brian still needed an explanation: ‘Freddie hit below ninety pounds the other week and still thinks his arms are too fat to expose to the outer world, and Roger’s been doing heroine for so long that the insides of his elbows are black and blue from all the places he tried to jam an injection through it.’

 _Ah, so that’s what the bruises come from,_ Brian thought to himself. For a moment he was thankful for John’s description of the physical irregularities of their roommate’s limbs, until the moment he added the pair of them to his description by saying: ‘And you and me because we cut, of course.’

This was one of the moments that made Brian decide he didn’t like the irregular verbs of the English language even less than other times; not just because he had never liked anything that didn’t correspond to the general patterns, but also because the form ‘cut’ did not make it clear if John meant if he used to cut, or still continued cutting to this day.

Even though he didn’t dare to, he still found himself asking it in the softest voice he had produced so far that night: ‘In which tense is ‘cut’ supposed to be understood?’

John, twisting a strand of long brown hair between two fingers, looked unnaturally fragile for his usual careless attitude when he replied: ‘I can’t speak for you, but in my situation it’s present tense.’

Brian knew it should not have surprised him, but yet it did. He had seen the cuts on john’s arms on the day of his arrival, and had immediately judged by the freshness of the marks and lines that they could not have been older than a day, maybe even less than that. That still left a lot of questions open for him, though.

‘But how?’ Brian asked the boy. ‘How do you… they took away my razor and they even removed the ruler out of my pencil case.’

‘A knife I smuggled out of the canteen a while ago. A twig I found outside and which I sharpened with my fingernails. The back of an iron tube of toothpaste. A nail I pulled out of a loose hinge of the door to the hallway,’ John summed up. ‘Really, Brian, it’s so easy for those who want to,’ he said in a way that it almost made Brian feel bad, invalid for not having looked for ways to harm himself on his own in this place. As if the category ‘self-harmer’ did no longer apply to him now that he had not used the first the best object he had come across to cut up his own skin.

John, quite obviously sensing that what he told Brian was likely to be working counterproductive, asked him: ‘This is not exactly comforting to hear, right?’

‘If you want me to be completely honest, not really,’ Brian said, not daring to look at John when he admitted that his ways were not really working the way he probably intended for them to do.

‘Yeah, I’m probably handling this the wrong way,’ John gave in. ‘I wanted to comfort you, that’s why I came over here. I heard you crying.’

Well, that was yet something else Brian had not been wanting for John to have noticed, and he gave a weak shot at trying to deny the claim. ‘I wasn’t… There’s just been something in my eye all evening,’ Brian said while bringing his finger up to his eye to pretend to rub whatever he claimed was in it out of it. It was a terribly lame excuse, the oldest one in the books, and Brian was fully aware of this. Luckily, John did not call him out on it; he just ensured him he did not have to make excuses.

‘You don’t have to be ashamed of it. It’s only human, I’ve been told,’ he told him, which made Brian look up at his roommate. Although his attempts at comforting had been somewhat awkward at far, John’s eyes were surprisingly bright and warm, and he could not look away from them when the younger man gave trying to comfort him another shot. ‘Listen. Freddie and Roger have been through worse things than an evening of fever. Roger had to be thrown into isolation upon his arrival here just to make sure he would stay clean and could not attack anyone in the height of his cold turkey, and Freddie hardly looked human anymore, weighting eighty-five pounds and refusing to eat anything else than cucumber and carrots, if I remember correctly. They’ve come such a long way, and they’re in a way too good position to have something like a fever pull them down, believe me.’

Although John’s monologue felt like a relief washing over him, Brian could not help asking him: ‘Are you sure? Even about Roger?’

‘ _Especially_ about Roger. He used to do heroin more often a day than my sister touches up her lipstick - which is a _lot_ , I’ll have you know,’ John added, once again surprising Brian by how witty he could be if he was talking to him in private with no other eavesdroppers around. ‘One random shot will not do him any permanent harm. As Freddie said, it might be exactly what he needs to remind himself to keep his hands off drugs from now of,’ John offered him a smile, which Brian hesitantly copied.

‘Honestly, I’m not concerned about Roger, and neither should you be,’ John told him, before he looked down at his hands, coughing a bit uncomfortably before he continued after a few tense seconds: ‘What I’m more concerned about at the moment is you.’

‘Me?’ Brian copied his roommate in somewhat of a squeak, not having expected this from John. Surely, the boy had proven himself to be more attentive than one would expect when judging him purely based on how aloof he kept himself from social circumstances, but for him to have noticed Brian quietly crying to himself for the past few nights, was not something Brian had thought John would have been aware of.

‘You, yes. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not blind. I know you’ve been crying yourself to sleep every night so far,’ John told him sternly, leaving no room for Brian to come up with excuses this time. Even if he would have allowed Brian to do so, the older boy found that he had none to offer him this time; John was absolutely right about him having cried himself to sleep the previous two nights, and if it hadn’t been for John calling out to him, the exact same would have happened to him for the third time in a row.

‘I never thought you were blind,’ Brian mumbled in reply. ‘I always felt like you were more aware to what was going on than people give you credit for.’

‘I do, and that’s exactly why I’ve been feeling so guilty lately,’ John said, as if this vague reference should make perfect sense to Brian - whereas, in reality, the boy found himself blushing when he had no idea what John was talking about.

‘Why… would you feel guilty?’ he asked when he really could come up with no reason.

‘Because I knew what was going down with you, how you were crying yourself to sleep every night, and I didn’t do anything about it,’ John said, looking away from Brian now. He looked terribly fragile all of the sudden, Brian noticed, when his company sat back on the bed and plucked at his nails.

‘Well, that’s not your task, after all. You didn’t sign up to be my roommate and run after me with every nervous breakdown I have,’ Brian whispered, fingers toying with the duvet the pair of them were sitting on. It was a bit of an awkward discussion now that the pair of them were not facing each other anymore, but it still felt good to talk to John in private, especially about a serious topic like this.

‘I know, but… I feel bad, because I hear you crying each night, I see you coming into the room with a cut on your cheek after having been beaten up by some asshole, I see you running out of the therapy session half in tears, and all I do is shrug and turn around as if nothing happened.’

‘That’s not true,’ Brian said. ‘You came after me to talk to me…’

‘… Because I couldn’t stand the way Jasper and Ariel were all apologies after they just made you break down. It annoyed me, that’s why I went after you. I didn’t do it for a morally right reason,’ John told him softly.

‘Still, you saved me from Jasper and Ariel,’ Brian tried to cheer him up, and even though it earned him a chuckle from John, he could tell that it did not soothe the guilt he did not believe John should be feeling in the first place.

‘Look, I just want you to know that I’m not as empty as I might appear to the outer world, and that I do care about you and how you feel, even if it looks like I don’t have any feelings at all. And I wish I’d stood up for you during the therapy session, and that I’d comforted you whenever you were crying yourself to sleep, went out to beat up Drew when he cut you with that knife,’ John said, all but the last of which were really nice thoughts to Brian. ‘But I was just… I don’t know. I just felt mentally immobilised, if you know what I mean.’

‘Paralysed?’ Brian said now that it was his chance to supple John with the word he was looking for.

‘Yes, that’s it. I felt paralysed; I saw and heard what was happening to you, but I could not act upon it, and it’s making me feel like the worst person in the world,’ John admitted, letting his head hang to prevent Brian from seeing the sad expression - perhaps even tears - on his face.

‘You shouldn’t feel that way,’ Brian said, but John wasn’t having any of it.

‘But I do. You jumped in to save Jimmy from a bunch of assholes pointing knives at you, and I can’t even ask you if you’re okay the moment you return from the first aid room on my own account. I’m such a coward, a loser, a-’

‘Don’t talk about yourself that way,’ Brian said, surprising both John and himself when he interrupted his company. ‘You’re a good person, John. You looked after me. Kept an eye on me. Helped me when I ran out of group therapy, came to talk to me just now, even saved me from Freddie’s Sherlockian talents upon my arrival…’ he said, the both of them sharing a chuckle when they thought of how their extravagant friend had attempted to read Brian like the famous detective not even five minutes after their first acquaintance. ‘The bottom line is, you’re a good person. It’s just your depression getting in the way of your good intentions at times.’

‘Make that ‘at all times’,’ John corrected him in a self-reproaching manner.

‘Not at all times. You’ve come to me now to talk to me despite your depression, despite the fact that you don’t like people. I really appreciate that,’ Brian told him softly.

John, who looked up at him, corrected him slightly. ‘It’s not that I don’t like people. I don’t like them as a group, as a whole, when they run after each other like a group of brainless wild horses. But I like some of them as individuals,’ he said, allowing himself to smile for a bit. ‘I like Roger when he makes jokes out of even the worst situations at this Godawful place. I like Jimmy when he’s all considerate and kind to everyone at group therapy. I like Freddie when… Well, when he’s not being too much… Freddie, if you know what I mean,’ John mumbled, which earned him a wide grin from Brian that made the younger man realise he had left out the most important person.

‘And I like you, of course,’ John added in what was supposed to be a nonchalant fashion, while Brian was almost positive he could detect a hint of emotion in his voice.

‘Do you now?’ Brian asked in surprise, finding himself even more baffled when John nodded wordlessly to confirm what he had just said. It was not as if he had expected John to completely hate him or so, but still… John seemed distant, absent, did not like social interaction and especially not with people who required a lot of attention - which was exactly the kind of person Brian felt like he was. Having John telling him he did like his company made Brian feel a relief deep inside which he had not felt in a long, long time. However, trying to play it cool and not show the blush on his face, Brian found himself asking half-jokingly: ‘At what times?’

‘So far at all times,’ John told him, and Brian by now seriously had to face the other way to make sure John would not notice how much this comment was making him blush.

Neither of them knew what to say directly after that, and John was eventually the first one to pick up the conversation again - or end it, rather. ‘Well, that seems to be a positive note to end this midnight chat on. I think we should go to sleep,’ he said, swinging both legs over the edge of the mattress as to prepare for leaving the bed he had been sitting on.

Brian was sad to see him go, but he agreed with John that it was about time - the alarm clock would go off at seven the next morning, so it was probably a good idea to follow the example of their roommates and go to sleep. ‘We probably should. Thank you for talking to me tonight,’ he told John as he crawled under the duvets, watching how John did the same at his own bed.

‘Thank you for having me over. And if you need me, whether it’s during the day or in the middle of the night, just let me know. I might seem irreproachable but I’ll be right here if you need me,’ John told him, just the thought of which made Brian feel warm inside. He wanted to tell John that the same went for him; that he could talk to him whenever he needed him, that he could drag him out of the shower or wake him up at three AM if necessary, but unfortunately, all Brian found himself capable of doing was whispering ‘thank you’ at his roommate.

‘Good night, Brian. And don’t worry about Roger. He’ll be fine,’ John promised him. Before Brian was given the chance to reply to what turned out to be John’s final words for that night, the other boy had already turned around in his bed as to silently declare that it was time to call it a night - for real, this time.

Still confused but mostly mesmerised by the unexpected conversation with his roommate, Brian leant over to switch off the nightlight, which covered the room in darkness for the remainder of the night. He soon fell into a peaceful sleep, the first one not to have been induced by tiredness endless tears brought upon him since his arrival at this place that might, perhaps, not even be as bad as he had originally thought.


	6. Part Six

When Brian woke up the morning after, it surprised him how remarkably alright he felt upon opening his eyes and realising he was not at his regular bedroom at his parent’s house, but in the dorm room he shared with three other boys at the institution. Granted, he’d rather woken up at home, but he did not feel as if someone had just hit him in the face with a brick at the realisation of where he was, like he had done every other morning upon waking up at Queen Mary’s so far. Perhaps the fact that he had had a reasonably good night was part of his positive mental- and physical state; for the first time since his arrival, he had not cried himself to sleep, which he assumed had had a positive effect on the way he woke up - which, also since the first time of his arrival, was without a throbbing headache torturing him from the moment he opened his eyes. Even his body felt better than it had done the previous few days; less stiff, less as if his legs had been glued together and left him unable to move, less as if his body was a voodoo doll which was constantly being pricked with needles by an invisible entity that liked to see him suffer with every breath he took.

Finding himself able to move without feeling like his body was on fire, Brian turned around in his bed to find on the display of his alarm clock that it was 06:57, a few minutes prior to the moment when the morning alarm would wake up the entire institution. This would include the other three boys in the room - who, judging by the sound of their soft snoring, were still sleeping peacefully at this point in time. Brian could not judge them; it was still early, and days at the clinic were rather intense, especially when on top of all the mandatory activities and check-up moments that started at half past seven and ended at nine if you were unlucky, you had to deal with a roommate somehow finding himself a shot of heroin and ending up all sick because of it as a result.

Speaking of which… Brian switched on the nightlight and propped himself up on his elbows, careful not to make too much noise and wake somebody up - not that the three more minutes of sleep would really make that much of a difference to any of them, but he would hate for the others to feel like he was spying on them in their state of unconsciousness. Luckily, no one seemed to move a single muscle while he sat his body upright, which granted him a better view of the two boys lying together in the bed across from his.

Even though the pair of them looked like they could not weigh more than maybe two hundred pounds to Brian, it still was a bit of a tight fit to have two grown men lying together in a bed designed for only one. They were lying closely against each other, out of what Brian supposed was not just a desire to be one, but also a necessity caused by the aforementioned lack of space. Still, with Freddie’s arm draped around Roger’s waist and Roger’s face buried in his chest, there was just enough room for the both of them to have survived the night without falling out of bed.

Levelling himself up a bit more for a better view, Brian could see in the dim light that the lamp on his nightstand permitted him that Roger’s face was still red with fever - less than it had been the evening before, but not nearly back to his usually pale skin colour. It made him bite his lip in nervousness; the last thing he wanted was for any of the medical staff to find out about the reason for Roger’s reddened complexion and the sweatiness and cold shivers that Brian at the moment could not see but of which he assumed still made Roger’s body tremble all over every other minute. Still, he was confident that the boy could pull himself together, and with a bit of help from the makeup skills he had been told Freddie possessed, no one would become suspicious of Roger’s ill health following his heroin dose. 

When Brian focussed on the couple a bit longer, he came to the conclusion that the sound of snoring almost exclusively radiated from Freddie. Roger was not only snoring but also coughing and gurgling in his sleep, unfortunate sounds that Brian assumed to be the effect of his shot of heroin followed by being forced to come clean all at once as a result of a lack of more drugs - which Brian was sure was a positive thing, even if Roger did not share this opinion at the moment. It was understandable that the previously drug addicted boy hated going cold turkey, but if Brian was to believe Freddie - who he assumed to be more knowledgeable of Roger and his drug past and present than Brian himself - it was going to be a matter of mere days before everything would turn back to normal again. Whatever ‘normal’ was going to be; Brian calculated that, if the shot of heroin Roger had taken by now was causing him serious physical issues as his body screamed for more of the toxic substance, he must have taken it somewhere on the first day, at the very latest on the morning after Brian’s arrival. It suddenly dawned on Brian that he thus had not experienced him clean for more than possibly half a day, and that he thus had no idea what his roommate was going to be like au naturel, as to say so.

This could turn out to be quite something yet.

Brian set his mind off the matter of what Roger would be like if he would be clean again when he remembered that he had not yet checked if John had been awake yet. Given that their quietest roommate had proven himself to be especially mute early in the morning, it seemed totally possible to Brian that John had been awake all the time while he had been spying on Roger and Freddie. The thought of this made Brian pale right at the spot, and he almost did not dare turn his head to the right to see if John had been looking at him all along. Still, he carefully turned around to see if the silence coming from John’s side was a result of him silently judging him in his spying escapades, or if it was because he was still asleep.

Brian was relieved to find that the latter option was the case; resting his eyes on John for just two seconds was enough to establish that the boy lying in the bed a few metres away from his was still sound asleep, eyes pressed shut and breath quietly passing through his slightly opened lips. In his sleep, John had curled up in the middle of the bed, where he now lay sleeping sound- and motionlessly. He had replaced his pillow by a hand on which he supported his cheek, while the other one hung over the edge of the mattress. Brian found it to be a calming sight, even though the arm on display was covered in the welts, marks, and scratches they had spoken about the evening before. The thought of how John continued to self-harm stung Brian like a knife in his heart, and he wished he could do something about it, do or say something that would make the boy stop and see how he deserved to treat himself much better than he currently did-

The sound of the morning alarm sneered through the air and halted all Brian’s thoughts for a moment. He quickly pressed himself down on the mattress again as to pretend to still have been asleep instead of spying on each of his roommates, but this soon turned out not to have been necessary; none of the three other boys seemed to move even a single muscle whilst the alarm rung through the hallway. Their apathy towards the alarm continued to surprise Brian; it was too loud for anyone, except perhaps someone with especially poor hearing, not to be woken up by it. He figured that the three of them had gotten used to it after having spent some time at Queen Mary’s, but still, all the alarm made him want to do was press his hands against ears and _scream_.

It was only after the alarm had fallen quiet again that some movement emerged in the room - it was Freddie who first sighed audibly in reply to the knowledge that a new day had started. Brian watched as he detached himself from his partner’s body, stretching out his willowy thin arms and yawning deeply before he saw that his roommate was already awake.

‘Morning, Brian!’ Freddie called out to him, loudly enough to not only attract the attention of his addressee but also making John react to him.

‘More like morning to the entire _building_ ,’ John sighed, obviously not pleased with the cheerfulness of his roommate.

‘Come on, John! It’s a _beautiful_ day!’ Freddie cooed, and though Brian was sure even John knew he was being overly excited on purpose, it still served to give John a reason to pull the duvet over his head and close himself off from Freddie’s quasi-enthusiasm.

‘Well, one down, one to go,’ Freddie said with a wink to Brian, before turning to wake his partner, who by now was the only person in the room not having shown a sign of consciousness yet. Now that John was invisible to the rest of the room, Brian looked on while Freddie ran his hand through Roger’s sweat-soaked tresses and shook his shoulder in an attempt to wake him up.

‘Roger, darling, time to wake up,’ he told him softly yet loudly enough for Brian to hear him at the other side of the room. Roger did not react at first, only grunting in disagreement by the time Freddie was using one hand to shake his shoulder and the other one to tear the blankets off his body.

‘Hm…Freddie, leave me…’ Roger mumbled in reply, but Freddie was relentless to him. Brian was quite surprised to find that he still possessed enough force in whatever was left in his body to pull a still sleepy Roger out of bed by placing his hands under his armpits and putting him down in a sitting position on the mattress. It set Freddie up for a string of sleepily murmured complaints, all of which he ignored without any difficulty while tugging his boyfriend out of bed.

‘I wish I could leave you here, but I have some work to do on your face to make sure no one notices your little heroin slip from yesterday, hm?’ Freddie told him more than just slightly judgementally; pinching his cheek between his thumb- and forefinger at any rate did not seem to have been necessary to make Roger’s cheeks turn red. His approach did seem to work, though; Roger finally gave in and cooperated with his partner, who dragged him off the mattress and helped him out of his sweat-soaked nightclothes. Brian did not have to ask if he had had a rough night; it was showing all over his face, in his tired eyes, the yawns he continued to emit while his partner collected some clothes, towels, and other items from the cabinet underneath the sink. He was tired, exhausted, and even though Freddie again told him that it was his own fault, Brian couldn’t help feeling bad for Roger.

‘You coming too, Brian? If we go now, we’ll hopefully be alone in the bathroom,’ Freddie asked him, catching the boy somewhat off guard. Brian found that he did not at all fancy a shower early in the morning - or at all, really, but when he remembered that he hadn’t washed himself in days, he reached the conclusion that it was probably about time, and that he might as well accept Freddie’s invitation to join them. He rather would have jumped back into bed and have a shower after group therapy, but then chances would be that he had to go on his own, which he did not feel comfortable doing now that he had declared himself to be a target for Drew and his equals.

‘Sure,’ Brian answered lightly, awkwardly catching the towel Freddie threw into his direction. Freddie and Roger waited on him while he collected his clothes - that was, picked up a clean pair of boxers, trousers, and the uniform shirt he judged not to smell too bad yet before he would have to drop it off at the laundry service - and then gave him a sign that they were ready to go.

When Brian was just about to walk out the door with a small bundle of garments under his arm, he suddenly remembered they were forgetting something. ‘Doesn’t John…?’ he asked while turning around to the boy they were leaving behind. He assumed it was on purpose; John was, after all, still hidden beneath a pile of duvets and covers and did not seem to be in the mood to join them, but it felt wrong to Brian not to include their roommate in their journey to the bathroom.

‘I’d rather make it through the morning _alive_ ,’ Freddie snorted, before he threw an arm around Roger’s waist and walked through the door. Brian, still slightly unsure of what they were doing, flashed one more concerned look into the direction of John’s bed, after which he hurried to catch up with the couple.

Freddie turned out to have been right about the advantages of going to the bathroom early; they had the entire space to themselves now that most people were probably still in denial of the morning alarm, trying to stay in bed as long as they could. Brian, having kept in mind Freddie’s advice on using clothing hooks after the debacle he had experienced during his first shower at Queen Mary’s, Brian chose a cabin in which he could easily string up his clothes. Freddie joined Roger in a shower cabin for the purpose of ‘helping him now that he was ill’, but soon it became obvious that by helping him out, Freddie had other things in mind than helping him washing up. Even though the clothing-hook-strategy had led them to be multiple cabins apart from each other, Brian was still able to overhear more than just a single moan and other sounds of pleasant surprise, which he assumed had little to do with washing your partner’s hair.

 _It probably really was a good thing that no one else had gotten the idea of going for an early morning shower apart from them,_ Brian thought to himself while massaging the shampoo into his hair.

Trying to ignore the sounds of whatever was going on at the other side of the room, Brian found his mind wandering off to the topic of John, who he assumed was still lying in bed by now. He knew it should not surprise him; the previous few days he had not gotten up before he had absolutely had to either, but today it seemed to bother Brian for the first time. Perhaps it was because he was feeling a lot better today as a result of what he assumed was the late night conversation John and he had been having the evening before, and he had hoped that perhaps it would have had a positive effect on John also. Then again, he realised there was no way talking to him made the other boy feel as good as it made him feel whenever he shared a few minutes sentences with John, let alone a whole conversation. Brian also could not quite place it; he had no idea why sitting next to him, getting reactions from, and other signs of approval from John made him feel so good. Maybe it was because he craved acceptance and approval from peers, but then why did he not feel the same way by far whenever he was in touch with Freddie or Roger? Why was it that only John’s approval of him could give him this sense of fulfilment he had never felt before?

Noticing the shower in the cabin of his roommates had been turned off and hearing their door opening, Brian was quick to rinse the shampoo out of his hair, turn off his shower, and rub his body dry with a towel before dressing up again. He stepped out of the cabin and listened with half an ear to the plans Freddie proposed to make Roger look better than he obviously felt, while he was actually more focussing on the question of what John was doing right now. Was he still thinking of their late night conversation, or had t already faded from his memory and sunken into the darkness that seemed to have taken over his mind completely? Did their conversation mean even half as much to John as it meant to Brian?

Brian tried to dry his hair with a spare towel as much as he could in an attempt not to look like a drowned poodle upon returning to their dorm room - or, even worse, to the canteen. It did not help much, and his curls still looked like an imploded soufflé on top of his head by the time they left the bathroom - for which people were now lining up in front of - and walked over to the pharmacy. Brian continued to pull and dab at his hair with his half-soaked towel, only shortly letting go of the business to tip his Seroxat with a glass of water before getting to work again. He hoped it was looking somewhat decent again by the time they entered the room again, as he did not want to look stupid when standing eye in eye with John again.

It turned out that there had been no need to worry about this aspect, as John still had not gotten out of bed. More than that, his entire face and body were still covered underneath the duvet he had hidden under when Freddie had attempted to make him get up from bed earlier that morning, and the only sign of life he gave when the three of them entered the room again was a moody ‘be quiet’.

Freddie sat Roger down on his bed and pulled out the bottle of concealer Brian had also stumbled upon the other day, which he squirted onto his fingers before massaging it onto Roger’s face. Brian’s gaze absent-mindedly lingered between the image of Freddie caking Roger’s face in makeup and the heap of duvet under which he knew John was motionlessly pretending to be asleep, until he was eventually called out of his daydreaming by Freddie, who seemed to be the only one to notice that time was starting to get tight.

‘Brian, it’s a quarter to eight. Will you drag John out of bed, dear? You seem to have the biggest chance of not being spat in the face when bothering him in the morning.’

Before Brian could even register what Freddie had just asked him, let alone wonder if being spat in the face was a metaphor for John’s foul morning temper or if it was an actual anecdote which had arisen from said morning temper, John exposed his face above his duvet to tell his side of the story.

‘That happened only once,’ John grumbled. ‘And I would not have done that if you hadn’t thrown a cup of water in my face.’

‘I had to do _something_!’ Freddie cried in defence. ‘You would have been sent to the counsellor if you showed up for breakfast late one more time!’

‘Since when is that it any of _your_ business?’ John asked him with a provocative edge to his voice that left Brian unsure if Freddie and John were just making fun of this particular instance, or if reminding each other of it brought u bad blood between the two. Deciding that - certainly from John’s side - there was serious anger involved in discussing the matter, Brian hushed: ‘Alright, alright. John, will you come out of bed without spitting anyone in the face?’

‘Because you’re asking so nicely,’ was the reply he received. It sounded somewhat cranky, but when their eyes met, Brian saw a weary smile on John’s face, telling him that no matter how much of a morning temper he had, he did not intend to act it out on him; even seemed to try and contain it for his sake. Brian could not judge if it was the case, but he liked to think that their midnight conversation contributed to the fact that John was being so mellow to him while he seemed to be ready to attack Freddie with the fork he had spoken of the night before.

While John got out of bed and slowly changed into the clothes he had discarded onto the floor the evening before, Freddie touched up the foundation he had applied all over Roger’s face. Brian and John were called in to judge the final result, but as John did not react, they were dependent on Brian’s judgement only. Freddie murmured about his foundation being a bit too dark for Roger’s pale skin colour - which Brian could not deny - and wishing he had a bronzer for the finishing touch, but as Brian had no idea what a bronzer was (and doubted if anyone else in this place apart from Freddie had ever laid eyes on one) he was able to secure Freddie that Roger was ready to leave the room.

Excited about leaving the room was a whole other topic, however. All of them rather would have stayed in bed, and none of them was in the mood for breakfast; Freddie for the obvious reasons, Roger because he was still feeling nauseous now that his entire body was screaming for heroin, and John for a reason Brian was not sure about as he did not exactly voice his state of being in the presence of others, and Brian himself because there was still too much on his mind to focus on the milk and cereal in front of him once they had settled down at the breakfast table. Roger half-heartedly pricked his fork in a scrambled egg and Freddie made an attempt at conversation with whoever was willing to reply; in all honesty, no one wanted to reply, but it were Roger and Brian who nodded and shook their heads at the right times to prevent him from embarrassment. John, in the meantime, kept himself completely distant from any kind of conversation involving more than one person speaking and listening to him at the same time. Brian had observed this behaviour before; there was little he had figured out about John in the four days he had been at Queen Mary’s, but everything Brian had seen and heard so far pointed to the conclusion that John did not deal well in groups, but liked having one-on-one-conversations. From the moment of meeting each other after Freddie and Roger had left the room, to their conversation in the bathroom when Brian had escaped group therapy; it was all too clear that John indeed, as he had stated the night before, did not like people as a whole but could appreciate individuals. And, according to that very same conversation, Brian was among the individuals he could appreciate. Liked, even - that was the word John had been using to tell Brian how he felt about having him in his company. John liked him, liked having him around, liked talking to him, liked-

‘What are you smiling about all secretively?’ Freddie’s voice suddenly interrupted Brian’s thoughts, and Brian looked up guiltily. He had not been aware of the fact that he had been smiling to himself, but apparently it had been all over his face - or, at any rate, visible to Freddie.

‘Nothing. Just thought of something funny,’ Brian shrugged it off, but his roommate did not want to let go of it that easily.

‘Care to share it with us?’ Freddie asked, seeming desperate to keep the conversation at the table going. Brian wished he could help him out, but he did not deem sharing what had happened yesterday night to be appropriate without John’s consent. And, if he was completely honest, he also preferred keeping their nightly conversation between the two of them, as a secret confirmation of the fact that John could be more sociable than everyone in this place seemed to be able to imagine.

‘Why don’t you stop bothering Brian and start eating that slice of tomato?’ John proposed, and even though it sounded grumpy, Brian could not shake off the feeling that this comment had been meant to stick up for him against Freddie’s eternal cross examinations.

‘It’s carrot,’ Freddie corrected his friend in a similarly distant voice, after which silence dominated the table again until the moment of the bell, announcing that breakfast was over and that it was time to meet up for group therapy sessions. None of them had finished their breakfast yet by this time, and neither of them cared to stuff the reminders of it into their mouths before walking off to their assigned places. Freddie proposed taking all their plates back to the counter - and offer no one refused - and left together with Roger while giving him a few stern words about not letting it show that he was feeling miserable and not looking people in the eye for too long, lest they saw his dilated pupils and the bloodshot edges of the white of his eyes.

Following the pattern of hating groups and liking individuals Brian had discovered John conformed to, John became more talkative once Freddie and Roger had left to go to their group therapy sessions and was left at the table with Brian only. They shared a few words about how Roger seemed to look much better than the day before, how there was thus no reason for Brian to about him anymore (even though he still did), and then slowly, sluggishly made their way to the circle of chairs that Jasper and Ariel started collecting in the middle of the canteen.

By the time they arrived, most people were already sitting (or at least hanging around) their assigned seats. The couple of them sat down at the same chairs as they days before; Brian saved the place next to him for Jimmy, but whereas before the boy had always seemed to be the first one to turn up at therapy the previous days, today he was nowhere to be found. Brian turned around in his chair to see if he was somewhere to be seen in the canteen, but the only thing this did was attracting the attention of the group leaders.

‘What are you looking for, Brian?’ Ariel asked him, and Brian, feeling like he had been caught in the act of doing something wrong even though he was unsure what exactly this would be, turned around in his chair and settled down properly.

‘Just checking if I could spot Jimmy,’ Brian shrugged as nonchalantly as possible. He expected no one else to care about the absence of a member, and indeed - John seemed to be the only one to glance around and help him out in his quest for Jimmy, which Brian expected more to be a sign of showing support for his action than actual interest about finding the boy. 

‘It’s not like him being late…’ Ariel remarked. ‘Has anyone seen Jimmy around?’ she said a bit louder to attract the attention of the rest of the group, half of which did not seem to listen and the other half of which simply shrugged as to confirm that they had no idea.

‘Was he at breakfast this morning?’ Brian found himself asking completely against his own instinct. He was not sure if he had to be relieved or not when almost no one seemed to pay attention to the question he had asked and which only elicited mild reactions from the group.

‘Maybe he didn’t feel like going after… you know, the thing with Drew,’ someone brought up as an answer as to why Jimmy wasn’t present. It seemed like a reasonable possibility, which was why Brian didn’t really like bringing up a counterargument. Still…

‘But he was here yesterday,’ Brian brought in against the claim, after which the speaker of it simply shrugged before turning away to talk to his neighbour again.

‘He’s probably just not feeling up to it. I’ll make a note,’ Ariel said as she scribbled down a few words on her clipboard, after which Jasper clapped to attract everyone’s attention and start the group therapy session. Brian bit down his lip - why did no one seem to care about the fact that there was no sign of a suicidal boy who had just been beaten up by one of the biggest bullies in this place? Why did no one care to find out where he was, or if he was doing okay?

Brian looked up when someone placed a hand on his lower arm - and, since the spot he had saved for Jimmy was still empty, it could be no one else than John, who was sitting at the other side of him.

‘I’m sure nothing is wrong with Jimmy. He’s been absent for no reason before,’ John told him. ‘And so have I. So has everyone in here. This is the depression talk group, after all. No one wants to be here,’ John said, which did manage to soothe Brian’s nerves concerning Jimmy’s absence, but which made him feel nervous for a whole other reason when the pair of them was called out for talking.

‘Would you care to share your private conversation with the rest of us?’ Jasper called out to the pair of them, which instantly made Bran blush and wish he could somehow disappear from the planet. However, being called out did not make John move a single muscle, and he handled the situation accordingly.

‘I very much do _not_ ,’ John said with a rather sassy edge to it. Brian was afraid talking to therapists like this would result in a reprimand of some degree, but nothing happened; Jasper, seeming to understand that John was going to press his lips shut even if it was going to be the _last_ thing he’d do, simply turned away from them and started the session with a few announcements and the introduction of today’s topic. At least half of the people present sighed deeply and the other half of them gave a chuckle when this turned out to be ‘positive thinking’ - something Brian expected none of their group was especially good at, seeing that they had not all been assigned for a depression therapy group for no reason. Jasper and Ariel seemed enthusiastic as ever, of course, and while Jasper wheeled in a green chalkboard they apparently needed for the upcoming exercises, Ariel distributed a paper containing examples of unfortunate situations which she said ‘might cause one to think negatively about oneself’. Brian quickly read over the examples, which varied from ‘arguing with your parents’ to ‘saying something stupid to someone you’ve just met’. Especially this second scenario was one Brian knew all too well, glancing at John from the corners of his eyes and seeing how his roommate was flipping the paper around in his hands without actually reading it. Not too many people seemed to make the effort of reading over the sentences - and the ones who did, did not seem to take the text in front of them very seriously.

‘Giving the wrong answer in class,’ the boy Brian remembered to be called Joshua (and who he mainly remembered to be rather insolent) snorted. ‘Were these made for primary school children?’

Ariel, visibly blushing, replied: ‘We assumed that most of you were still attending education. You’re still young, right?’

‘None of us are in school. Not at the moment, at any rate,’ someone commented, which no one present could deny.

‘Moments like these make me long to go back to school, though,’ another commented. ‘School sucked but at least they didn’t force me to go to group therapy each day!’ he said loudly enough to make people at the other side of the canteen turn around to see what was going on, especially when this comment was received with cheering from the people in the circle around him. It seemed to Brian that practically everyone was engaged in encouraging whoever this person was in his rude behaviour - everyone apart from John and him. John and he shared a look between the pair of them, during which John’s overly neutral expression was all Brian needed to see to know that he was ready to get it over with the buffoonery of their team mates.

‘Alright, alright, very funny,’ Jasper said before he turned around from the schoolboard he had been cleaning from chalk and dust to instead face the group that was having a moment of fun - something Brian expected him to normally be in favour of, but not now that it was at the expense of his co-worker. ‘That was enough from your side for today, Lester,’ he warned the boy, who rolled his eyes and turned back to his neighbour. Jasper, again letting this sign of disobedience pass, attempted to catch everyone’s attention and make them look into the direction of the schoolboard, on which he had shortly summarised the different scenarios they could also find on their paper. The group grunted when they heard they were to come up with psychological thought schemes for each of them, especially when Brian - not yet used to the way therapists ruled at this place - needed to be given a bit too long of an explanation of what these were by Jasper. The therapist was all enthusiastic when explaining to him that one was to write down one’s thoughts, behaviour, and acts upon encountering one of the situations written down on the schoolboard and how one could positively influence their way of treating said situations in the future when becoming aware of one’s own attitude towards it. The idea did not sound too bad to Brian, but his team mates seemed to think differently about the case; while Jasper focussed on him to explain the idea behind thought schemes, Ariel was trying (and failing, frankly) to prevent the rest of the group from folding paper planes out of the papers they had been given and throwing them at each other’s heads.

Once Brian had been familiarised with the activity, Jasper took over whatever control Ariel had been having over the group, and directed those still in the possession of a piece of paper to the first situation the text described. Encouraging people to speak their thoughts, feelings, and behaviour towards having failed an exam did not work as no one felt the need to reply, which caused Jasper to call random people up to the board to write down what they thought. Brian soon found that this strategy was a lot less efficient than simply letting people sit in their chair and say the answer out loud; now Jasper lost half of the time they could have used on thought schemes on trying to convince people to stand up and walk over to the board instead, which did not do much to better the mood of either the group of the therapists in charge of the group. Brian himself did not put up much of a fight when his name was called out, and neither did John; Brian because he did not want to place too much focus on himself, and John because he was probably too done with the entire activity to even complain about it anymore.

After an hour they had not even managed to go through half of the situations written down on the paper, and though Jasper voiced his displeasure about this (which people laughed about rather than take it serious), he said it was going to be no problem; they would simply continue the remainder of them the day after. The group was displeased about this in turn, but unanimously seemed to understand that it was their own fault, since they had been the one delaying the exercises with every single opportunity they had gotten or created themselves. Not listening to complaints, Ariel collected the papers from Brian, John, and a few others who had held onto them for the time being and had to pick the rest off of the floor and unfold them from their aeroplane-shape. Brian could not help but feel bad for her, and even more than that, feel ashamed on behalf of his therapy group. Granted, he wanted to be here discussing his mental misfortunes just as little as they did, but taking it out on their team leaders was a childish, ignorant thing to do. They were not to blame for their depression and especially not for the shitty morning temper most people had come in with.

Seeing as half of the people had already gotten up from their chairs and made their way to the exit of the canteen, Jasper called the therapy session to an end and everyone was officially excused, for whatever that still was worth now that most people had already taken leave by themselves. Ariel wished them all a nice day and Brian felt like a nerd when he found himself being the only one returning the favour to their therapist.

Brian stood up from his chair as what seemed to be the last person of the group, and he turned to John, who was standing next to him and stretched out his arms after just having sat in the same position for an hour. The sleeves of his grey shirt slipped up to reveal the cuts underneath it, and Brian looked the other way to distract himself from the view of it.

‘Well, one therapy session down, two to go,’ John mumbled while tugging the sleeves of his shirt down again, possibly because he had noticed how Brian had averted his gaze from it.

‘Two sessions?’ Brian asked, giving John a quizzical look. He himself had to see his therapist an hour each day, usually between four and five. Freddie went to see his five times a week, and Roger only three - although he did have to check in with an addiction expert the same amount of time a week. However, as far as he was concerned none of them had ever needed to go to therapy twice (or actually thrice, if you included group therapy each morning), which made him wonder what John was going to be needing to go to that day.

‘Individual therapy and a meeting with my psychiatrist. They’re thinking of upgrading my medicines,’ John said lightly, even though Brian was not too sure if this was the right approach to what his roommate just said. He had not had the courage to ask which antidepressants John was given or how strong his daily dose of it was, but he had been standing behind him in line at the pharmacy in the morning, seeing him swallowing four pills when Brian only needed to take two. There was a possibility that John was given medicines for something else besides his depression - hay fever, high blood pressure, vitamin deficiency, or whatever other medical cause there could be. But the pills had looked too similar to each other, which had led Brian to believe that John was just being given a high dosage of antidepressants in an attempt to cut the edges off if his depression.

‘Either way, that won’t start until two, and lunch is also still hours away. Do you have any plans?’ John asked Brian while leaning back against the table behind him, which gave him even more of an air of nonchalance than that which already seemed to come to him naturally.

‘Not really,’ Brian shrugged, even though actually, he did have something in mind - he was just not too sure if it was the right thing for him to do. Jimmy’s absence continued to make him feel low-key concerned about the boy, and he wanted to drop by his room just to see how he was doing. Just to make sure he was doing okay and give him some words of encouragement to get up and leave his room if that was what he needed. Trying to sound as neutral as possible when proposing this, Brian half-looked away from John when he said: ‘Maybe we could check on Jimmy in his room?’

John did not seem surprised by the fact that Brian had not yet let go of the absence of a boy the rest of the group had forgotten about the minute after they had brought up his name; in fact, he even gave him a bit of a sad look when he had to disappoint Brian on this one.

‘I don’t know where his room is, and we can’t look it up. Privacy policies,’ John added when Brian gave him a questioning look.

‘Right then,’ Brian said, feeling more than just a bit powerless when he heard this. However, when John once again told him that someone missing was one of the most normal things to happen at group therapy - and that everyone showing up on Brian’s first day of therapy literally had been a unicum - Brian was able to let go of the matter and focus on what they were to do next. Their entire group had already left, Japer and Ariel had just finished putting the chairs back in place (something Brian had felt was a task they should do as aa group, but apparently he was the only one thinking that was), and the other therapy groups surrounding them also seemed to wrap up their sessions. It seemed like it was time to move on. ‘So… what do we do now? Go back to our room?’

John pulled off a bit of a grimace, obviously not too excited about going back to the place where they inevitably would be faced with the rest of their roommates. This, at least, was the only reason Brian could come up with for John’s lack of agreement, given that John seemed to enjoy lying in his bed all day long a lot, and would love doing so if it hadn’t been for the fact that Freddie and Roger usually went back to their dorm room to lie half over each other and sing each other songs. Brian did not usually complain; they had good singing voices, especially Freddie, who had told him more than once already that he dreamed of becoming a singer once he got out of Queen Mary’s. However, John was usually unexcited about noise or even sound in general, and therefore seemed to prefer finding a peaceful location other than their dorm room for the moment.

‘We can go outside,’ John suggested. ‘I don’t believe you’ve been to the gardens yet.’ Then, before Brian could even reply, he added: ‘Or well, gardens… It’s more of a wasteland containing a few benches and three half-dead tulips. But it’s usually pretty quiet outside. Care to go with me?’

‘Yeah, I’d love to,’ Brian answered as casually as possible, feeling himself starting to glow from the inside just at the thought of being alone with John. Sure, they had had their moments - right before leaving for dinner on the first day, their talk in the bathroom when he had ran out of the therapy group, their evening conversation the evening before… But this seemed to be different. In all previous cases, they either had been stuck with each other’s presence in the moment, and Brian had always been unsure if John really wanted to talk to him or if he just didn’t want to make things even more awkward than they already were. But now that John asked him to go outside with him and spend time with him, Brian thought it was safe to assume John at the very least did not mind his presence - just like he had admitted the evening before.

‘Good. Follow me,’ John told him, and Brian blindly did so. They walked to the exit of the canteen, and John quickened his pace the moment they arrived in the hallway. Brian assumed it would have something to do with the fact that the space was crowded by people who had just come out of their therapy rooms, and that John was eager to avoid conversation or confrontation with all of them. Brian found himself agreeing with this; although people did not point at him and look at him as the resurrection of Jesus Christ himself anymore, he could still hear some people calling after him and reminding him of how he had stepped up for Jimmy  two days ago.

After about a minute of walking, they arrived in the hallways Brian had found himself trying to hide from the therapy group leaders the other day after he had gotten up and ran away. He remembered the doors to unknown rooms at either side of the hallway, the bathroom he had found refuge in, and the swing doors at the end of the hallway where two guards were hanging against the wall and flicking through a magazine. At the sight of the two of them approaching, they jumped back into position as if they had been caught red-handed in the act of forsaking their duty (which, in all honesty, they kind of had). John gave a bit of a snicker before he opened the swinging door, and Brian smiled softly when John held it open for him before entering the separated part at the end of the hallway himself.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ one of the wardens said while not so subtly trying to put the magazine, which he was hiding behind his back, on the desk behind him. Brian looked around to see not just this, but also chairs, a file cabinet, a telephone, and a wardrobe stacked in the small space; it looked more like he was about to cross the douane at the border between two countries than that he was trying to walk outside. From glancing through the window the previous few days, he had already made up that fences, complete with barbed wire at the top, enclosed the space around the clinic. What exactly was there left for the management to be so afraid of and to cause such a fuss at the back door that granted access to nothing than even more terrain restricted by security and fences?

‘Morning,’ John said as he held up his badge to the first of the guards. Brian wanted to follow his example, but as his hand wandered off to the patient card clipped to the waistband of his trousers, the warden in front of them revealed he had other intentions for him.

‘Spread your arms and legs, please,’ the guard said, which made Brian give him a puzzled look.

‘Pardon me?’ he asked as politely as he could, as if he had not just been given what sounded like a rather dishonourable request.

‘Pat-down,’ John explained shortly without looking at his confused friend. Brian could feel the blush creeping up his cheek again as he followed the guard’s orders; frisking was not something he had considered yet, but he knew it should not have surprised him that staff looked through people’s clothes here whenever they wanted to leave or enter the building. Seeing that Roger had somehow managed to get his hand on a shot of heroin (and, with that, a needle, a spoon, and a lighter, Brian assumed), not to mention that Drew had been in the possession of a weapon, was all the proof Brian needed to understand that patting down was probably not a stupid idea at a place like this, even though he felt increasingly awkward the more the guard felt at his body through his clothes.

In what seemed like an attempt to break the somewhat awkward silence, the warden checking John’s card and noting down some details casually asked: ‘Fancy going outside in this weather, Deacon? I’d rather stay in if I were you. It’s only what, two degrees out there?’ he said with a questioning look at his co-worker, as if he was supposed to know the temperature of that particular day by heart.

‘I’d rather not,’ John replied somewhat tersely, leaving Brian to wonder if this was an answer to whether he’d not rather stay inside, or if he’d rather not have this sort of small talk at all.

‘At least take a coat with you,’ the guard told him.

‘Will do,’ John said, offering the guard as much of a smile he seemed to be capable of. The man gave John a sign of approval and handed him back his card, after which he traded places with his co-worker. The man who had just patted Brian down rather intensely only loosely checked on the pockets of John’s jeans - seeing as they also knew his name, these men had probably known John for a while, and were not suspicious of him anymore. John indeed did not seem like the kind of person to cause troubles by smuggling drugs, alcohol, weapons, or whatever more inside - just the kind of person who wanted to be left alone.

In the meantime, Brian had picked up the card dangling around at the height of his hip and handed it over to the man who had turned his attention to him. He was given a vague mumble of thanks before the guard, equipped with pen and clipboard, noted down what seemed to be all personal information that was to be found on his patient card. Brian awkwardly looked the other way, not knowing what he should say or do, especially not when John’s pat-down session was done after no more than ten seconds while his warden continued tracking down Brian’s data for what seemed like an hour but what could not have been longer than a minute. Still, every second in which every person around him looked at him was one too many to Brian, who chewed on the inside of the cheek now that the staff member was frowning at his patient card as if he had never encountered anything like it in his life.

‘Henry, is it just me or can I not figure out this code?’ he said as he gestured for his co-worker to come over. ‘F32 and F60-61. Depression and…’

‘Borderline,’ John replied before the second guard was even given the chance to move over and have a look at the indecipherable code.

‘Borderline? Never heard of that,’ the man whose name apparently was Henry said, to which John simply shrugged while he picked up two way oversized looking jackets from the coat rack.

‘Then I guess you’ll have something to read up about once you’ve finished your magazine, Ian,’ John low-key called him out, which seemed to make the guard swallow painfully. ‘Come on, Brian,’ John said as he pressed one of the coats into Brian’s hands, and Brian, giving the somewhat perplexed wardens a polite nod, followed his roommate outside.

# # #

The guards had been right when saying it was probably a good idea to stay inside; it was not just cold, perhaps a few degrees above zero, but the wind was also adding up to the coldness Brian felt the moment he closed the door behind the pair of them. The bright, low-set sun did not do much to better the temperature; all it really did was making Brian have to squint against it if he wanted to catch a decent glimpse of the space surrounding Queen Mary’s. Not that there was too much to be seen, though. John had already warned him that there was little more than grass surrounded by fences, but experiencing this with his own eyes, made Bran feel a bit sad. There really was nothing worth seeing about the so-called ‘gardens’, and if it hadn’t been for John having asked him to go outside with him, Brian would have spun around and gone back inside instantly.

John, seeming to notice his disappointment, told him: ‘So this is what staff calls the gardens and what we call the wastelands. It looks a bit less desolate in summer, though.’

‘I’ll take your word for that,’ Brian answered, even though he was not too convinced; the dry grass and handful of bare trees before him did not look like they would ever come back to life again, let alone that they would ever paint a pretty picture.

‘I would show you around, but there’s not too much to show you, as you might have noticed,’ John said, staring at the sight in front of the pair of them. He seemed to follow Brian’s glance as the older boy looked at the few facilities around the place - a ping pong table, a pair of swings, metal benches no one wanted to sit on in this season, trash cans he expected no one to ever throw anything in since it was forbidden to take food outside of the canteen.

‘So what, eh… do you usually do out here?’ Brian asked him when they did not speak for a moment, hoping it did not show that he was somewhat desperate to keep the conversation going - which was a talent neither of them seemed to have been blessed with.

Raising his shoulders, John told him: ‘I just kind of walk around the place. Sit on the swing. Avoid other people who might happen to be found here,’ he said with a nod to two silhouettes standing with their back turned to them at the edge of the garden; either they were engaged in some very personal conversation that needed privacy, or they were trading drugs. Brian was inclined to lean towards the latter option.

Silence again, before John surprised Brian when he suddenly told him: ‘Maybe this was a stupid idea.’

‘What was a stupid idea?’ Brian asked, feeling his heart skip a beat when he heard these words. Did John regret taking him outside with him, did he want him to leave so he could have the space to himself and not have to share it with someone as boring and awkward as he was?

‘Taking you outside. It’s cold and nasty and not at all very cosy out here,’ John said, and Brian could swear he saw a hint of embarrassment in his roommate’s eyes before he cast them down to the grass they currently found themselves standing on. ‘If you want to go back to our room…’

‘No, no, I’d rather stay here,’ Brian was quick to reply.

‘Are you sure about that?’ John asked him, seeming sceptical.

‘Absolutely,’ Brian ensured him. Of course it was not the location he was currently finding himself at that he was desperate to cling on to, but the person he was with. He had John all to himself at the moment, and he was not planning on giving that up anywhere soon.

‘Alright then,’ John said, sounding pleasantly surprised. ‘Shall we move over to the swings then? They’re less cold than the benches,’ he explained, as if Brian still needed more convincing to agree to sitting down and talking to John for a while. Together, they slowly made their way through the barren grass, Brian copying John’s way of hanging his head down when someone - more often a guard than another patient - crossed their path.

‘I wonder what they were reading,’ Brian thought out loud, giving a nod into the direction of the wardens they had passed before they had been allowed to walk through the doors.

‘Probably Playboy or some other porn magazine,’ John said as if this was the most normal thing in the world. Brian grimaced - the possibility of that had passed his mind, but he had not dared speaking it out loud.

‘At work?’

‘It’s not as if anyone really cares about what they do,’ John shrugged. ‘They’re short on staff; management will hire anyone who’s willing to stand around all day long, regardless of whether they actually guard the place or just pretend they do.’

‘They seemed to take their job rather serious, though,’ Brian said. ‘You know, writing down an entire portfolio based on our patient cards…’

‘Yeah, that’s kind of a thing here,’ John told him, probably realising Brian had not encountered this specific part of Queen Mary’s way of looking after its patients. ‘They note down your data wherever you go. The gym, the tv room, the game room… To see if people are actually leaving their bedroom at other moments than for therapy and mealtime. See if we socialise and other nonsense. That’s why I go outside every now and then; I won’t have to talk to anyone here, and counsellors won’t come running after me asking me why I’m in bed twenty-four seven. It’s like a win-win situation, really.’

‘Clever,’ Brain chucked, looking up at last when they approached the iron construction from which two swings were hanging down from thin, iron cables. The whole thing looked a bit instable to Brian, but as he saw that John sat down on the swing at the left without seeming to think twice about it, he followed his example. The moment he sat down on the rubber seating, Brian realised it had been years, perhaps even a literal decade since he had last been on a swing. It felt wobbly, unstable, as if he could fall over or tumble off the thing with every movement he made. Still, when John put the swing in motion by lightly palming off against the ground beneath their feet, Brian could not oppress the tendency to do the same and reexperience a bit of childhood joy.

They sat in silence for a short moment, after which Brian suddenly found himself asking: ‘It’s not that I’m not enjoying all this, but why exactly are there swings and ping pong tables at a place for men aged between eighteen and thirty?’

‘That’s a question most of us have been thinking about,’ John said, continuing to slowly rock his swing back and forth. ‘I think they tried to make it look more inviting.’

‘It still looks like a jail, though,’ Brian mumbled.

‘It was a jail at some point, after all,’ John said in reply, which made Brian put his foot against the grass and halt all motions of the swing.

‘ _Really_?’ he asked, and he could not help sounding more than just a little surprised - not to say, as if he had just discovered a solid cure for all forms of cancer.

‘Didn’t you know?’ John asked him in a slightly accusatorily way, but he straightened his face and voice when the look on Brian’s face told him he had not been aware of this fact at all. ‘This was a jail until about twenty years ago, when they moved the prisoners to a new and better secured building. People didn’t know what to do with the premises then; it looked uninviting, out-dated, and was too far away from the rest of civilisation to rent out to any kind of business. So then someone came up with the idea of locking the mentally unstable up at this place - far away from society, in a building already equipped with locked doors, bars before the windows, and fences all around the premises - and here we are!’ he said. His quasi-enthusiastic voice struck Brian as excellent acting, and the willingness with which he told him stories like these - as compared to the short answers he gave to Freddie, Roger, or anyone else whenever they were in a social setting - Brian found to be even more surprising. He knew he should not be, though. Upon multiple occasions, John had already proven himself not to be nearly as antisocial as Freddie and Roger had made him out to be. John did not like groups, but he could talk reasonably to individual people when he was alone with them - and especially with him since last night. Something had changed between John and him since the conversation they had been having the night before; something subtle, something he could not lay his finger on exactly. It was small, small enough for other people to perhaps not notice, but Brian surely did. John had never been cruel, curt, or passively aggressive to him, but following their evening of conversation, he had become even more approachable to him than he had already been before. Brian, at any rate, felt like John never would have asked him to hang out with him if it hadn’t been for the pair of them opening up to each other the evening before.

Speaking of the night before… ‘John? Do you think… Roger is okay again? After his… you know, taking heroin and all?’ Brian asked, insecurely fidgeting with the way too long sleeve of the coat John had given to him. He felt like he was annoying John by being unable to shut up about Roger ever since it had become clear he had taken a shot, but really, he could not help it. The sight of Roger sinking to his knees, sweating and shaking and crying and most of all begging them not to tell anyone about his escapades, was something he could not get out of his mind. Brian had never engaged in drugs himself, and given that Freddie and mainly John stayed so calm upon Roger’s perhaps not so unexpected drug use (in their view, that was), made him want to cling onto them and have them tell him what to do while Roger looked like he was on the verge of dying.

‘I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s gotten his hands on a shot of heroin what, ten times since he got here half a year ago?’ John asked, more to himself than to Brian. ‘It just makes him sick as hell for a day, and after that he’ll slowly recover, swears he’ll never do it again, and two weeks later he’s back at it again. Really, it’s nothing.’

‘It didn’t look like nothing,’ Brian mumbled, still not able to shake off the feeling that something was terribly wrong with Roger, even though the people who obviously knew him better than he did told him otherwise.

‘You really think about other people a lot, don’t you?’ John suddenly remarked, making Brian turn to him. ‘Roger, Jimmy, being nice and polite to Jasper and Ariel when nobody else is...’ he summed up. Although Brian hadn’t thought of this before, he found John to be right; ever since he had gotten here, he had found himself constantly thinking of the behaviour, health, and well-being of the people around him, much more than he had done at home. Then again, at home it had just been his parents, who seemed to be as mentally stable as a brick, with him being the only one people wanted to look after - here he was one of many, and by far not the worst case. Sure, his depression and borderline were dragging him down, but he was not wasting himself away trying to live on breathing air and beating the scale, injecting liquid poison into his body, or staring at a wall and mutilating his body quite as badly as John, Freddie, and Roger seemed to be doing.

‘I just think everyone deserves knowing there’s someone thinking about them when they’re going through an especially bad time,’ Brian shrugged off the comment as to make it look like it was nothing special he was constantly concerned about everyone.

‘That’s a nice thought, really,’ John allowed him. ‘But I’m afraid you’ll be lying awake for nights if you want to keep that strategy up during your stay here.’

‘That’s not too far from the truth,’ Brian mumbled. ‘With everything I see here and everyone I meet.’

‘I don’t hope you’re worried about me, though,’ John said with a bit of a smile. Then, when Brian did not confirm nor deny this wish, he added: ‘There’s no reason at any rate, I’ll have you know.’

 _Sure, you’re at a mental institution just for the hell of it,_ Brian dimly thought to himself, but decided not to say these words out loud. ‘I do have my reasons to worry about you.’

‘Such as?’ John asked, turning to Brian by now. This direct confrontation, however, was not something Brian was prepared for; sure, he had a whole list of reasons for him to worry about John, but he had not expected John to ever ask him to recite all of them out loud.

However, John was still looking at him as if he very much was expecting him to pull op his list of details to worry about, and Brian, succumbing under the pressure of his staring eyes, started off: ‘I mean… I don’t want to hurt you, but… you’re… you know, _sad_ most of the time.’

Hearing Brian making so much effort to beat around the bush had John laughing out loud, which struck Brian as the first time he had ever really heard him do this. It was a heart-warming sound, and it was beautiful to finally hear a real sign of happiness - or amusement, rather, in this case - from his severely depressed roommate. Brian could not help but join in on him, be it a bit more awkwardly since he fully understood John was laughing about his current inability of phrasing things.

‘I sure am _sad_ most of the time. They call it a depression,’ John chuckled when they had shared a laugh about the situation, before he pulled himself together and told Brian: ‘But really, you can just say to my face what’s worrying you so much. Maybe I can cure you of worrying.’ Brian liked the thought of that, but he was not too hopeful that John could cure his worrying about him with just a few words; if he could not even be convinced that going through cold turkey was nothing to worry about, how was anyone ever going to convince him there was no need to stress out over a severely depressed, suicidal roommate?

‘You just… well, you have a depression,’ he started off with, which was confirmed with a chuckle and a _that’s fair_ from John. ‘I didn’t mean to spy on you, but I’ve seen you’re using quite some medicines every day. You lie in bed staring at a wall for the largest part of the day…’ Brian continued, noticing from the corners of his eyes how the more reasons he summed up, the more John seemed to be having trouble oppressing the smile that tugged at the corners of his lips. Brian knew exactly what it meant; it was not exactly his strategy, but he had been told that laughing away your problems was a coping technique many people resorted to. It was a way of not actually having to seriously talk about your issues, which unfortunately for John was exactly what Brian was aiming for at the moment. Again, he was not the person to pry - he’d rather leave that to people like Freddie - but the setting they were finding themselves in, in combination with yesterday’s conversation, made Brian believe that if there ever was a moment to talk about this topic, it should be now.

‘You seem nervous when talking about your problems,’ Brian mentioned carefully, and though this made John smile again, it was now his turn to blush.

‘Just not used to people paying attention to me, or thinking about me,’ John said. Brian saw that the boy sitting next to him had started digging the toes of his left shoe into the grass below him, which seemed like yet another attempt to give himself something to do while the pair of them talked about a serious topic like this. It made sense to Brian, though; just like himself, John was quiet, did not like to draw attention to himself, and therefore the thought of people thinking about him was awkward. However, just like everyone else, John deserved knowing people thought and cared about him.

‘I think you should better get used to it, then,’ Brian said, and before he could even shut himself up, he found himself saying: ‘Because I think about you.’

Their eyes met for a moment, but John was quick to turn away and leave Brian with a similar - or probably even worse - blush on his face  when he confided: ‘I think about you a lot, too.’

‘Really?’ Brian whispered after the moment of silence he needed to let these words sink in. Not even in his wildest dreams could he have imagined John thinking about him, worrying about him the way he did about him. John always seemed so absent-minded, so busy in his own world and thoughts about what seemed to be topics no one could ever understand… Hearing that John thought about him - a _lot_ , not to forget - was something Brian needed to process for a bit.

‘Believe it or not, but my mind is not entirely blank when I stare at walls,’ John said with a bit of a smile, looking up at the grey sky above them. ‘Of course I think about you, what got you here, your mystery diagnosis, and if you should be here in the first place.’

All of this sounded kind to Brian, but the final sentence made him feel somewhat uncomfortable. Why did John wonder whether he really belonged here? Did he not believe in his new (and, admitted, still somewhat shady) diagnosis? Did he not believe he had a depression, that he used to self-harm, that he’d lost his friends, school, hobbies, and all the rest of the structure of his life as a result of simply not being able to keep up with any of it anymore during the depths of his depression? Or even worse, did John think he was making things up?

‘Do you mean you… Don’t believe I’m ill?’ Brian asked him quietly with what felt like a knot in his stomach, which untangled the moment John debunked this idea.

‘No, no, that’s not the thing. I do think there’s something up with you - no, hold on, that also sounded mean,’ John said, obviously finding himself in a struggle for the right words. He gave himself a second to think before he said slowly, more carefully: ‘What I meant is that you’re sensitive, kind, innocent… And it makes me doubt if Freddie, Roger, and I are the right people for you to hang around.’

‘Why would you not be the right people for me to hang around?’ Brian pondered out loud, not seeing what John was getting at.

‘Well, you know… We’re not exactly quality role models,’ he chuckled, falling back into what seemed to be his habit of laughing his problems away, before he seriously started diving into them. ‘Freddie has anorexia. He’s not just sitting with us during mealtime because he wouldn’t listen to his counsellors telling him to sit with the rest of them, but because he wouldn’t stop encouraging recovering anorexia patients to stop eating altogether,’ John revealed, which was a story Brian had not heard before but which he had no problem believing. During all their meals so far, it had taken a lot of insistence from the three of them just to convince Freddie to eat about three slices of tomato or something of similarly low caloric value, so it really did not surprise Brian the counsellors had decided not to have him sit around other anorexia patients while they tried to recover.

‘Then Roger… seeing him on drugs, or more in the aftermath of it, seemed to be rather nerve-wrecking to you,’ John continued, which was something Brian could not deny. ‘And I’m just depression, negativity, and uselessness all around,’ John smiled as to laugh away the issue, but Brian wouldn’t let him this time.

‘You’re not. I think you’re great. You cheer me up, for once. You came over to comfort me multiple times, you stayed with me… I just wish you would give yourself more credit for who you are and what you do,’ Brian told John him, which had John looking away from him again. Brian could accept this; he had just revealed he was uncomfortable knowing people showed care and attention to him, which was a problem Brian himself all too well. He would accept John not facing him as long as he continued sitting next to him and listen to him when Brian gathered all courage he could find in his body and told John: ‘I know this must sound funny from someone who used to cut, but you deserve better than mutilating yourself, John. I wish you wouldn’t do that to yourself anymore.’

‘I might have a splinter of good news for you on that one, though,’ John mumbled. He seemed to sense that this comment made Brian turn and look at him, because he went on to add words Brian had never expected to hear during his stay here. ‘I haven’t cut since the day you arrived.’

‘You haven’t… Really?’ was all Brian managed to bring out at first. A thousand thoughts ran through his mind - the image of the cuts John had shown him the evening before, the tools he had enumerated which he used to mutilate his own skin, flashbacks to the time in which Brian had laid hands on his own body in similar ways… The combination of all of these thoughts were a lot to handle, and hearing John casually mention he hadn’t cut in half a week as if it was nothing, did not add up in Brian’s mind, no matter how much he wanted to believe the words of his roommate.

‘Really,’ John confirmed nonchalantly.

‘But you… Yesterday you said-’  Brian reminded him, even though this was about as far as he got before his own voice failed him. The evening before, John had told him he still cut to that moment, had given a vivid description of which tools he used and where he had found them. And now suddenly he told Brian he did not cut anymore, hadn’t been doing so in days? Brian was glad that an explanation followed, because he himself thought he was either making things up or losing his mind - and quite possibly both.

‘Yesterday I said that I still cut because I didn’t want to share the news too early and risk breaking my own promise. Because, you know, it’s only been four days since I stopped,’ John reminded him, even though they both knew not cutting for four days in a row was huge when you used to have a go at self-harming multiple times a day. ‘But then I way lying in bed and realised I wanted you to be the first one to know I was attempting to stop,’ John explained. This decision on its own seemed brave enough to Brian, but John managed to make himself sound even more courageous when he added: ‘And then I realised I could not cut if I would throw everything away, which is one of the reasons we’re outside, to be honest.’

‘Throw away…’ Brian repeated softly. He had a feeling he knew what John was referring to, but that seemed too good to be true, so he pushed the idea right out of his mind. It turned out that he should not have done so, because the moment he told himself John couldn’t be serious about throwing away his self-harm tools, the boy next to him crossed one leg over the other, rolled down his socks, and, after having looked around to check if no one was paying attention to him, he pulled out tools Brian had thought he would never get to see at this place. There was an iron nail, a piece from an iron toothpaste tube, a sharp-looking twig, and even the small knife John had mentioned he had smuggled out of the canteen a while ago. The four items conformed exactly to the account of tools John had given him the evening before, and Brian found himself staring at them, before he looked up to look in the eyes of the owner of the items.

‘This is what I meant when I said the guards just stand around all day,’ John said with a smile, and though Brian was inclined to join him, he knew that in reality, it was sad, deeply sad to know that mentally ill people could smuggle tools to hurt themselves with into a place like this. A place where they were supposed to stop cutting themselves, hurting themselves, mutilating themselves, something that never was going to happen if security was apparently as leaky as a sieve.

Wrapping his hand around the items, John jumped off the swing. Brian followed him with his eyes and felt his heart skip a beat when John stopped at the iron trash can randomly standing next to the swing construction. Architectural design definitely was not one of the stronger assets of this place, but Brian was thankful to whoever had placed the bin there now that John stood next to it, bringing up his hand to throw the sharp items through its slot and say goodbye to them for what Brian hoped was going to be forever.

‘I’ll throw these away,’ John said leisurely, ‘if you promise you won’t make attempts to harm yourself anymore either.’

That was not a hard question. Not only was Brian too afraid of cutting himself at this place out of fear that someone would find out (even though it seemed like one could smuggle an atomic bomb through the back door without any of the staff noticing), but just the thought that him agreeing to John’s offer would make his roommate stop harming himself, was all the convincing Brian needed.

‘I promise,’ Brian said without skipping a beat, feeling a wave of relief gushing through his body when the handful of tools disappeared into the bin. This marked the beginning of a new begin for John, who he noticed looked a bit lost when the boy slowly made his way back to the swing and sat down on the rubber sitting again.

‘I’m proud of you, John,’ Brian told him, and John smiled a bit to himself.

‘You should be proud of yourself. You convinced me to stop cutting.’

John kept surprising him, really, because this again was something Brian had never expected to hear. ‘How did I- I never told you…’

‘No, but when I saw the horrified look on your face on the first day… you know, when I showed you my arms to let you know you’re not alone…’ John clarified in case Brian had forgotten, even though there was no such scenario possible; Brian remembered every second of it, and with a nod of his head, he encouraged John to move on. ‘Well, I saw how shocked you were, and it made me see that I really was a lot further gone than I had been willing to admit up to that point. Knowing that the sight of my scars scared someone like you, a seasoned self-harmer just like me… That was what I needed to decide I had to stop at once.’

 ‘I… don’t know what to say,’ Brian stammered when the meaning of what John had just told him started to ring through to him. ‘Just that I’m proud of you.’

‘I’m also proud of you,’ John said. ‘You know, for…’

How John was going to finish this sentence was something Brian was afraid he was never going to find out; before he got the chance to speak whatever had been on his mind, his quiet voice was interrupted by that of someone shouting both of their names somewhere in the distance.

‘Brian! John!’ they heard someone calling out their names, and they turned to each other before looking into the direction from which the voice had come. Brian saw two silhouettes making their way towards the place they were sitting, and he assumed it would be no one else than Freddie - with Roger tagging along - who could possibly be so excited to see them.

‘Oh Lord,’ John said as the pair approached, obviously not too excited about their private conversation having been put to a halt by the arrival of their roommates. Brian would have preferred to have John all to himself for a bit longer as well, but he could not deny feeling relieved when Roger walked into their direction way all on his own, without needing assistance from Freddie like he had been needing when they left for the shower that morning. The redness of his fever was still slightly visible through the foundation Freddie had caked onto his face, but he looked a lot more stable than he had been before, and his body did not seem to shake at all anymore once he was standing in front of them.

‘My oh my, what are you two doing outside?’ Freddie asked, sounding seriously surprised upon finding the pair of them at this place. Brian could not blame him; seeing John voluntarily going anywhere did not seem to be a thing they often got to witness, and John taking someone with him on his way seemed to be an even rarer phenomenon.

‘Just showing Brian around this wasteland,’ John replied. ‘What about you?’ He mainly seemed to aim at Roger, who had gotten down on his knees on the ground and was spreading a handful of thin twigs and sticks around before him.

‘I was just taking Roger outside for some fresh air, but now he’s trying to light the place on fire, I’ve come to believe,’ Freddie told him while jumping around on the place he was standing, but Roger objected against this explanation.

‘I’m trying to set fire to these twigs so I can smoke them,’ he said, even though this caused only more confusion in both John and Brian, who did not see how he was planning on doing this.

‘Don’t look at me, I don’t know either,’ Freddie excused himself, clapping his hands above his head. ‘He’s just desperate for any kind of substitute for his beloved heroin.’

‘And what are you doing, jumping and bouncing around?’ Brian asked Freddie, who continued to clap his hands and stomp his feet in which seemed to be a poor attempt at summoning rain.

‘Just trying to stay warm out here,’ Freddie shrugged.

‘That’s because you don’t have a single ounce of fat on your body,’ Roger reproached him, even though he must have realised that he was not much better off than Freddie - the only difference was that losing weight was an active goal for Freddie, whereas Roger had lost a large part of his body mass during his drug addiction. ‘Come here, you can sit next to my camp fire once I manage to light these stupid twigs…’ he murmured while rubbing one of the aforementioned twigs between flat hands in an unsuccessful attempt to make fire.

‘Darling, you’ve been trying to make fire for over ten minutes. I’ve lost faith in these dead sticks by now,’ Freddie said, which made Roger look up at him and grin at him in a way that made Brian believe that some indecent comment was going to follow.

‘Then come over here so I can personally warm you up,’ Roger suggested, and while Freddie flashed him a wink for making this offer, John sighed deeply.

‘Keep your shower business in the shower, guys,’ he told them, indirectly confirming Brian’s idea that what had been going on in the shower that morning had not been a one-time event.

‘The idea of physical contact really is too much for you to handle, isn’t it?’ Freddie purred at John while he sat down on the ground next to his partner in such a clumsy manner that it made Brian wonder if he could ever manage to lift his malnourished body off the ground again afterwards.

‘The idea of human contact on its own already revolts me half of the time,’ John muttered, but he gave a soft look into Brian’s direction which told the other boy that he did not include him in his general idea of human contact. Brian was relieved to see this, but it turned out that he was not the only one to note the exception John was making for him.

‘Does it now?’ Freddie asked as he cocked an eyebrow at John. ‘You don’t seem to mind Brian’s presence at all.’

‘That’s right,’ John confirmed Freddie’s idea without expanding on it any further. This seemed to be a disappointment to Freddie, but it came as a relief to Brian - he liked Freddie, surely, but he did not need to know about their every move, certainly not when it came to his relation to - perhaps even friendship with - John.

‘Sounds promising,’ Freddie cooed. ‘If you want us to stay in bed some longer in the morning so the two of you can have a go in the shower…’ he suggested boldly, which made Brian wish he could disappear off the earth and which made John seem to wonder if he could strangle his roommate and get rid of the body before security would look into their direction. Luckily, neither of them had to tell Freddie he should keep his mouth shut; it was Freddie’s own partner who took care of this business, be it in his own way.

‘I’m not giving up my morning blowjob just so they can get at it,’ Roger protested without taking his eyes off the twig he continued to spin around.

‘You won’t have to,’ Freddie hushed him, running his thin fingers through Roger’s hair. ‘Our bed has proven to be a _perfect_ place to fuck before John started complaining about the noise,’ Freddie reminded his partner, and Brian did not think he had ever felt second-hand embarrassment quite as bad as in this exact moment.

‘Doesn’t Roger have counselling one of these hours?’ John said in an attempt to change the topic from early morning shower sex to a more decent subject, something especially Brian was all for.

‘Yeah, at half past ten. We should probably move on,’ Roger said, finally letting go of the sticks that to this very moment had not proven to be very cooperative of his plan to make fire out of them. He stood up and reached out a helping hand to Freddie, who - not to Brian’s surprise - required it in order to get up from the grass again.

‘And I think I’ll be going to the gym room,’ Freddie announced, avoiding the sceptical glances John and Brian gave him upon hearing this plan. ‘Are you coming, dears?’

Brian looked at John in the hope that he would make the decision for them. They had been having a good time outside, especially before the unexpected arrival of their roommates. But it was cold; the sky looked ominously dark as if it could start raining anywhere soon. On top of that, if Roger would have to go to counselling and Freddie would disappear into the gym for what previously had turned out to take half of the afternoon, John and he could continue their conversation in their own room.

John seemed to have the exact same arguments in favour of going inside in mind. ‘We’ll have the room to ourselves. And we can always come back later.’

Brian agreed with a nod and they stood up from the swing they had sat on for quite a while. He gave one more look at the trash can John had thrown all his tools into them, and prayed someone would soon empty its contents so that they would be gone forever.

‘Coming, Brian?’ John said as he turned around to look at the last person of the group to not yet be following Roger, who had taken the lead in directing everybody back towards the building again. Brian was quick to catch up with John - and, unfortunately, by having done that, he had also submitted himself to Freddie’s fantasy that was running wild at the mere thought of John and him being alone in the dorm room while Roger and he were out.

‘Now if you decide to shag in our absence, make sure to do it in Brian’s bed,’ was the first shard of conversation Brian overheard, and it immediately made him raise an eyebrow. Even though Freddie had proven himself to have absolutely no problem talking about sexually oriented topics, Brian could not get himself used to the ease with which he spoke of them. ‘I’m still somewhat confident that he’ll change his own sheets, and I’m not ever changing yours again if you make love in your bed, John,’ Freddie told them quasi-sternly, but Brian could hear the amusement shining through his voice.

‘Sure, Fred,’ John replied with an eyeroll that Freddie pretended not to see. They neared the building and as Roger proved still to be too weak to pull the heavy bulletproof glass door open (and Freddie thus did not even try to) John stepped up to do it for them. They handed back the coats, their time of checking back into Queen Mary’s was noted down by the two guards who by now had hidden their magazine under a pile of papers on the desk, before they were allowed to walk through the swing doors and towards the

‘It’s only ten past ten,’ Roger remarked. ‘I expected it to be later.’

‘In which case, can we go to the bathroom first? I kind of feel like washing my hands,’ Brian said, turning the palms of his hands towards himself. Holding on to the iron cables of the swing had left a layer of black smudge that could either be oil or grime or God knew what else. Whatever it was, Brian preferred getting rid of it as soon as possible.

‘Perhaps that’s an idea for all of us,’ Freddie said with a nod towards a door a few metres ahead of them. ‘There’s a bathroom right there.’

‘I know,’ Brian answered, which seemed to surprise Freddie.

‘Have you been in this wing before?’ Freddie asked, and Brian could suddenly see why Freddie had given him a strange look - he had not been present when he had ran out of the first group therapy session to find refuge in this bathroom.

‘Well, that’s a funny story,’ he said with a bit a chuckle as he pressed the door handle down and pushed the door open. ‘It so happened that on my second day here- oh,’ Brian said, pausing his sentence halfway through as his heart skipped a beat and his voice stocked in his throat, leaving him unable to speak anymore. His hand slipped off the handle it had previously been lying on, and Brian instead clamped it over his mouth in pure shock.

‘What was a funny story?’ Roger asked to catch up on what Brian had been saying, but he soon seemed to get the gist when Brian’s entire body started trembling while he faltered a few steps back.

‘Oh my God, oh my-’

‘What’s wrong? A spider in the bathroom?’ Freddie asked with a disgusted expression on his face. Brian vaguely remembered that he did not like spiders either, but after having seen what he just saw, discovering a tarantula in the sink would have been least of his problems.

‘No, no, no-’ Brian wheezed, continuing to take steps back from the place to which he had just opened the door of. The boys around him gave him odd looks, odd looks which turned into startled ones when Brian tripped over his own feet and landed against the wall across the door at the other side of the hallway. He vaguely noticed the pain of his head clashing against the plaster wall behind him, but even this feeling faded in the back, as everything did to Brian at this particular moment.

‘Brian!’ Roger called out, and together with Freddie, he was quick to get down next to Brian on the floor. Neither of them had a clue of the cause of Brian’s sudden shock, and they were all too eager to find out what had caused such panic in their roommate.

‘Brian, what’s wrong? What did you see?’ Freddie urged him while shaking his shoulder, but Brian could not speak; his breath was ragged to the point where hyperventilating seemed to be only moments away, and his voice was little more than a wheeze when he pointed at the room before covering his face with his hands, completely losing himself in helpless sobs.

‘John! John, what’s wrong?’ Freddie turned to his other roommate now, as if John - after having spent a moment alone with Brian outside - could have the answer to the question they all wanted to know. But John knew nothing more than any of them; he just stood there in the middle of the hallway, at the exact same place he had been standing when Brian had opened the door. It was still standing slightly ajar, and John reached a shaking hand out towards the door handle.

‘Careful, Deaks,’ Freddie urged him just before John closed his eyes bravely swung the door open, which Brian, through a haze of tears, could see was something John instantly regretted when he turned his head away and shut the door with a lot more force than necessary, causing it to bump up against the doorpost and then slowly fall open again. Brian wished he could have warned John, told him not to dive into the sight of what he’d just seen a moment ago. But there had been nothing he could do apart from crying, hyperventilating, and trying not to pass out, which became harder and harder with every second in the hallway of which the walls suddenly seemed to close in on him.

‘Fucking _hell_ ,’ John gritted out as he let his body fall against the wall next to the door, crashing his fist against the grey surface of it. Brian had never heard John cursing, let alone turn violent, but he knew it to be a sign of absolute helplessness - the same feeling he felt at this moment. So powerless, so useless, so fucking _helpless_.

Though he impossibly could have missed John’s disgraceful words, Roger was still largely focussing on Brian - and, upon seeing he was starting to slip away from earth further and further, he made an attempt to get up from the floor. ‘Brian needs some water, John,’ Roger said, but John brushed off the idea of this - or perhaps not so much the idea, but the execution.

‘Don’t go in there,’ John warned Roger before the boy could get up from the floor on which he had just sunken down. ‘No one go in there, I’m serious.’

‘Why not? What’s going on?’ Roger asked, and then, louder: ‘Can anybody tell me what’s going on?!’

‘Quiet! Quiet everybody,’ John urged him and the other two while closing his eyes and pressing his hands against his ears as to block out all possible sensations and focus on the one thing that was important at the given moment.

‘John…’ Freddie tried softly, but John reached a hand out in his direction to indicate that he was not available for talking. Then there was silence, silence from everything and everyone apart from Brian’s ragged breathing, until John eventually looked over his crew with weary eyes. Eyes that looked like they had just seen hell - and Brian found himself thinking that this wasn’t far from the truth.

‘Roger, stay where you are. And you, Brian, you too,’ John said messily. ‘Freddie. Go get Nolan, Derek, those two guards standing over there, _anyone_. We’ve found Jimmy,’ John said before he weakly pushed the door close to distract the body hanging from the ceiling from his own view.


	7. Part Seven

‘Let’s give it another go today, shall we?’

Sarah’s voice was confident and hopeful as ever, and Brian almost felt bad for her that the upcoming therapy session was most likely to end up being a complete failure for what had to be at least the fifth time in a row. He had lost track on how many days had passed since the moment he had found Jimmy’s body hanging from the ceiling in one of the public bathrooms until this very moment, sitting in Sarah’s office which he found himself wanting to leave more and more with every passing second. By counting the sleepless nights he had had so far, however, Brian estimated that four or five must have been the minimum number of days that had passed since Jimmy had taken his own life, shook up the entire institution, and left Brian behind with even a more crippling depression than he already had been suffering from than before that dark day.

‘Do you want to talk about the incident right away or…?’ Sarah asked him, as if she actually thought Brian was going to give an answer to this question. All Brian could think about from the moment she asked him this question, however, was of how much he hated the way she referred to jimmy’s death as ‘the incident’.

 _Incident. Accident. Unforeseen situation._ The name staff members gave Jimmy’s suicide differed per person, but to Brian it all came down to the same principle - an unexpected death none of them had seen coming and which none of them could have done anything about it.

Nonsense. Bullshit. Absolute lies. People had been aware of Jimmy’s suicidal tendencies, his severe depression, his recent suicide attempt, Drew’s go at abusing him. People had known, but no one had done anything, no one had made any effort to take a closer look at him or take measures to prevent Jimmy from hurting himself. All everyone did was acting sorry and surprised after the news was released, before going back to their daily routine like nothing had ever happened.

Brian despised all of them.

‘We’ll start off with something simple,’ Sarah said, either misinterpreting Brian’s silence or pretending like she did not notice it, even though Brian was pretty sure his recent quietness was literally anything anyone could notice about him. ‘How did you sleep last night?’

 _Terrible. Hardly. Not even sure if I slept at all,_ Brian thought to himself, but he had no intentions of sharing this with his psychiatrist. He stared at the wall across the room, which was something he found himself doing a lot lately. Really, ever since Jimmy’s death, Brian had started to understand John’s habit of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling more and more. It was the only thing that allowed him to bring some peace and quiet into his at the moment chaotic life.

‘Had any breakfast?’ Sarah went on to ask, again without any sign of response from Brian, who pretended he had not heard her, that she wasn’t even there with him in the room. He knew she hated it; she could hardly stand his silence, but at the same time had little to do to make him speak up. What was she going to do, drag him around the room by his ear until he would open his mouth?

‘Brushed your hair, put on some clean clothes, took a shower…’ Sarah summed up in an attempt to get Brian to confirm any of these assumptions, but when he remained silent as ever, she eventually put her clipboard down on her lap and leant in closer to Brian, as if she was going to say something important. She announced ‘important’ matters and questions every other minute, but so far Brian had not deemed one of them to be grave enough for him to reply to.

‘It’s been five days, Brian. You can’t stay silent forever.’

 _Would you fucking watch me,_ Brian mumbled under his breath, too soft for Sarah to even notice his lips had been moving. Her claim was not entirely true, by the way; he had said ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ and similar constructions on numerous accounts, but this apparently did not count as speaking. Brian could see the logic behind this, but was unwilling to do much to change it.

‘Brian, _anything_. Just say _anything_ ,’ Sarah told him - _begged_ him, rather. She was starting to sound more desperate with every passing day her patient showed up at her office, only to absent-mindedly sit around for an hour without making any attempt to conversate with her. Desperation was an emotion she had only recently started showing towards Brian’s apathy, he suddenly concluded. On the first day after Jimmy’s suicide, she had been patient, understood his silence, told him he didn’t have to talk yet if he did not want to. On the second day she’d continued this strategy, be it while trying to press him into talking - needless to say, with little success. The third day she had just sat across from him and stared at him as to see which one of them could hold out longer, which was a battle Brian assumed she must have known from the start she was going to lose. Then yesterday, Sarah had fired questions at him again; kind, careful, but with a growing insistency when Brian had not reacted to her for most of the hour that made up a session. And that brought them to this day; one on which Sarah’s strategy so far seemed to be to beg and implore him to start talking to her.

Brian was curious to see how far she’d come.

‘Can’t you just say something? It doesn’t matter what. Your name, my name, yes or no…’ she tried again, and then, when she was greeted by nothing but silence, she cleared her throat and leant forwards to him even more. It surprised Brian she hadn’t fallen off her chair yet, but even if such an event would occur, he did not think it would make him move a single inch.

‘Alright, back to the basics,’ Sarah said. ‘Do you want to be here?’

‘ _No_ ,’ Brian said tersely. Even though he did not look at her and though his voice made it all too clear how he thought about this session, Sarah seemed to be pleased with just the fact that he’d spoken.

‘That’s not what I wanted to hear, but it’s a start,’ Sarah said, seeming more than relieved when she finally had found something she could scribble down on her clipboard. ‘Where do you want to be?’ she asked a little more confidently, but her smile instantly faltered when Brian said something quite different from the ‘in bed’ or ‘at home’ she had anticipated.

‘In a world where Jimmy didn’t get killed.’

Without looking up at her, Brian could tell his therapist needed a second to swallow and think of how she was going to react to this reply in a most psychologically acceptable fashion. Brian knew she was going to disagree with him on this specific matter, as did most of the people in this place, but he was not going to take back what he said. He was going to stand by it even if it would be the last thing he’d ever do in his life.

Forever leaning towards him as to create a fake atmosphere of trust and comfortability, Sarah corrected him: ‘He wasn’t killed, Brian. He committed suicide.’ Brian hardly heard her over the sound of his own thoughts screaming at him, his own brain making noise just to block out the lies she was trying to convince him of. It might work on other people, but Brian would not fall for them.

‘He was killed,’ Brian repeated in a mumble. ‘Drew killed him.’

Sarah seemed to have some minor issues keeping her voice calm and stable when she replied. She obviously did not see Brian’s point of reasoning, but still tried her best calmly explaining what everyone around Brian seemed to have accepted as ‘the facts’.

‘Drew was in isolation following the incident earlier last week,’ Sarah said, and Brian had to oppress the tendency to roll his eyes when the word _incident_ fell from her lips. It seemed like everything in this institution that did not go the way it should be going was pushed aside with the words _accident_ , _incident_ , _unforeseen_ , and the like. Brian felt like people could be harassed, raped, murdered here on a daily base, and still management would refer to the systematic abuse as ‘isolated incidents’ which no one could have prevented - and which therefore no one had to take responsibility for. ‘There is no way Drew possibly could have been involved in Jimmy’s death.’

‘He _was_ involved,’ Brian said. ‘When I say Drew killed him I don’t mean that Drew was the one hanging him up from the ceiling, but that Drew was the _reason_ he committed suicide,’ he added with his arms crossed over each other, as if he could not believe he had to explain the situation to other people. Of course he knew Drew hadn’t hung Jimmy personally; he had been thrown into an isolation cell in the basement following his attempt to beat Jimmy up and poke Brian’s eye out two days before the suicide. Brian knew that just as well as the next person. But what Brian knew even better, was that Drew’s words had had a deep impact on Jimmy, who was just recovering from a failed suicide attempt from the week before, and whose mental strength seemed to have hit an all time low. Brian could still see the sorrow, the grief, the tears in Jimmy’s eyes when he had been on the floor as Drew had stood over him, telling him he wished Jimmy would pull through with his suicide attempt for once so they’d be rid of him forever-

Sarah’s voice interrupted Brian’s thoughts mid-sentence. ‘We don’t know if Drew’s behaviour towards Jimmy was the reason for his suicide.’

‘Do you believe for even a _second_ Jimmy would have committed suicide if it hadn’t been for Drew?’ Brian threw at her, which seemed to catch the woman by surprise. Still, she managed to pick herself up pretty well within all of a few seconds.

‘We don’t know, Brian,’ Sarah told him softly. ‘Jimmy was depressed. Had been for a while, actually.’

‘So you think it’s a coincidence that he kills himself two days after people beat him up? Tell him they wished he would kill himself for real for a chance, so he could make place for actual people to get help instead of the pile of sadness he was-’

‘I’m sure that’s not how they said it,’ Sarah tried to hush her patient - which, unfortunately for her, seemed to work counterproductive on Brian, who no longer made any effort to keep his voice down and appear cool, calm, and collected. He was furious, and it was about time people knew.

‘That is how they said it! Who was there when it happened, you or me?’ Brian spat out at his therapist, who at last sat back in her chair to create more distance between the two of them. She seemed to be shocked by the fact that she was being screamed at - or perhaps not so much the screaming part (Brian assumed she must sit through that quite often at a place like this), but the specification that it was him who shouted at her. After their calm introduction and equally tranquil start, which then faded into complete silence, Sarah obviously had not expected for Brian to suddenly stand up and shout at her from out of the blue.

‘Brian-’ Sarah said in what sounded like pure shock, but Brian was not done yet.

‘Who rescued Jimmy while Drew pulled the bandage off his the wrists he’d tried to slit a few days earlier, you or me?’ Brian continued in the same loud voice. ‘Who had to scratch open someone’s skin before they were willing to let go of a suicidal boy, you or me? Who risked having their eye poked out with a knife to save someone else, you or me?’ he asked, his voice increasing in volume and his anger growing when Sarah just stared at him without saying a word. ‘Who was it?!’

‘Brian, don’t shout at me,’ Sarah said calmly, but Brian could catch the glimpse of fear in his eyes when he jumped up from his chair and stood before her, the motion of which made the clipboard fall off her lap.

‘Who was there when Drew beat Jimmy up? Just answer my question!’ Brian demanded. He knew that what he was doing was totally unacceptable, and that he might be hearing about his ‘inappropriate behaviour towards a staff member’ by whatever kind of counsellor they would send him to to resolve his ‘anger issues’ or whatever kind of story they would make up to justify his behaviour at this specific moment. Little did he care, however - he wanted people to listen to him, to give him answers to the questions he had instead of being forced to answer theirs all the time.

‘You were there, Brian, and I wasn’t. I know,’ Sarah finally gave in in a surprisingly calm voice. She did not sound afraid of him anymore - which Brian decided was probably a good thing, because he had not seriously meant to hurt or scare his therapist. Sarah was a good person, a kind woman, and he knew all she wanted was the best for him. It was just a shame that what was good for him was not a matter the pair of them seemed to agree on at the time being.

Sarah seemed to see that Brian was starting to come back to himself again, because she told him: ‘Brian, sit down. Calm down. Do you want some water?’

‘I don’t want to sit down and drink some water,’ Brian scorned the idea, yet he still got down on the chair he previously had been sitting on as to partly obey to the order.

‘Then what _do_ you want?’ Sarah asked him insistently. She sounded seriously interested in whatever offer Brian was going to make, but her enthusiasm soon dropped when Brian told her what he was looking for at the moment.

‘What I want? I want justice for Jimmy,’ Brian said determinedly.

‘And what would you consider to be justice?’ the woman asked, picking up the clipboard she had dropped during Brian’s moment of rage not even a minute before.

‘I want Drew and his people to be thrown out of this place. Preferably right into jail,’ Brian grumbled.

‘I’m afraid that that won’t happen,’ Sarah said as she scribbled down Brian’s words in a quick, fluid movement. Then, when Brian gave her an odd look, she continued: ‘Drew will be punished for the possession of a knife and getting physical with Jimmy, of course. He’s still in isolation. The people who were with him have been released again-’

‘Released? Why on earth-’

‘We couldn’t put them in isolation any longer,’ Sarah said with what looked like an apologetic shrug. ‘There was technically nothing they’d done wrong.’

‘Apart from encouraging their friend to drive someone into suicide, that is!’ Brian shouted into her direction; not so much at her, but to express the anger he felt towards whatever brainless creature had made this unfair, fucking unfair decision.

‘There is no way to know for sure if his encounter with Drew was what drove Jimmy into suicide,’ Sarah reminded Brian again, but Brian was tired of the excuses everyone continued to make up.

‘I’m pretty sure it’s true, though! What else do you suggest caused him to want to kill himself apart from three people beating him up and telling him to take his own life?’

The passive aggressiveness of Brian’s voice seemed to have an effect on his psychiatrist. Instead of answering the question, Sarah calmly replied: ‘Brian, how long did you know him? Three, maybe four days?’ she estimated. ‘I don’t want to come across as mean, but… how are you so sure you know his thoughts and motifs after only having spent a few hours with him?’

Brian sat back in his chair, and looked the woman sitting across from him with a slight frown on his face. He had been perfectly aware of the fact that he had known Jimmy for mere days, but he did not need to hear this from someone who said it in order to convince him of the idea that Drew could not be held accountable for Jimmy having taken his life in any way. Brian chewed on the inside of his cheek while he pondered for a reply, and only spoke when he was sure he had come up with something that was sure to silence Sarah for a moment.

‘I’m not claiming I knew him well or that I was his best friend,’ Brian said, trying hard not to let his anger shine through too much, knowing this would be an excuse for people not to take his words seriously. ‘But I do believe that I’m more capable of understanding the motifs and thought processes of a depressed person of about my age than anyone who learned about depression through the DSM,’ Brian finished with a slight smile of satisfaction towards the way he had indirectly addressed and called our Sarah for her indirect knowledge of depression, which did not come from first hand experience but from flicking through manuals of mental disorders. He did not know where or how he had gathered the courage to speak of someone of authority in such a fashion, but figured it had something to do with having had Drew push a knife against his cheek five days ago. If he had been able to stand up for Jimmy and himself in that sort of situation, then surely he could stay in place when faced with a psychiatrist who was at least five inches shorter than he and of whom he was sure did not carry a knife or any sort of weapon with her.

Brian could swear he saw the usually calm and rational Sarah snap when she heard him say this, obviously feeling personally attacked by Brian saying that ‘Mind you, I studied for this for four years-’

‘Congrats. I’ve so far been absorbed in mental illnesses for six years of my life,’ Brian reminded her bitterly. Sarah opened her mouth and looked like she wanted to complain for a moment, but eventually seemed to think better of it when Brian continued to stare at her as if he was ready to rip her medical diploma - which by now he had figured out had been framed and hung above her desk - apart if she would snap at him now.

‘Let’s not go here, Brian,’ Sarah said instead. ‘Let’s handle this like adults.’

‘Yeah, let’s,’ Brian replied somewhat sarcastically. ‘This adult would like to know how long Drew and his fellow scum will have to serve in prison.’

Sarah sighed - this was obviously the exact opposite she had been meaning. However, when she saw that Brian was serious about what he had just implied, she turned towards him and explained once again: ‘Brian, there is no way to prove they were involved in Jimmy’s suicide.’ Then she added, totally against anything that Brian had been expecting: ‘And even if they were, they cannot be held responsible for it.’

After a few seconds of silence that Brian needed to let this message sink in, he asked his psychiatrist: ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, this… There is a reason Drew is here at Queen Mary’s. I know I’m not technically allowed to inform you of other people’s diagnosis without their explicit consent, but I think you can keep it to yourself, can’t you?’ Sarah asked, and Brian, be it somewhat hesitantly, nodded at her. ‘I’ve treated Drew for a while, before he was sent to more intensive psychiatry. Either way, I know that Drew has anger issues, a sadistic personality disorder, and an antisocial personality disorder,’ she summed up. ‘As psychiatrists we would describe him as a psychopath.’

‘Not just psychiatrists,’ Brian mumbled, before he got back to business. ‘Either way, so what? We all have problems here. That can’t be an excuse.’

‘I know, but Drew’s diagnose makes him unaccountable for his actions, to a certain degree. We call this diminished responsibility. Are you familiar with the concept?’

Brian was positive he must have heard it in social science class in high school somewhere, but for the time being, be preferred pretending that he did not know the idea behind this legal term, nor did he want to find out more about its meaning and consequences. ‘So I could just go around the place harassing people and blame it on my borderline?’ he asked sharply.

‘That’s not how it works, Brian,’ Sarah corrected him in her eternally patient voice, but Brian was not having it this time.

‘Then why does it seem to work exactly like that for Drew?!’ he demanded to know.

‘Look, it’s complicated, but your borderline and depression does not inherently cause you to become violent,’ Sarah went on to explain. ‘whereas aggression is one of the main symptoms of Drew’s mental disorders-’

‘So we’re just gonna let them get away with murder because he tends to get angry?’ Brian cut her off mid-sentence, his anger full back in force again.

‘Brian, I’ve told you time and time again that it wasn’t murder. And he won’t just get away with pulling out a knife at you - we’ve signed him up for more counselling and he’ll have all his privileges taken away from him.’

‘Oh yeah right, he won’t be allowed to watch TV for two weeks. I’m sure that’ll make an impression on him,’ Brian said sarcastically.

‘Brian, don’t be like this,’ Sarah told him, which reminded Brian of his mother, who had occasionally pleaded the exact same words at him when he would be having one of these moments where he could turn the smallest detail no one else would even notice into a huge deal. It was a shame for Sarah that in his current state of frustration, not even resembling his mother in a vulnerable state of being could save her from Brian’s harsh words.

‘I don’t care about him pointing a knife at me! Scratching my cheek is nothing compared to murdering Jimmy!’ Brian was shouting by now, and he noticed that somewhere along his latest remark, he had stood up from his chair. ‘And nothing you or anyone else in this place can tell me will convince me that Drew is not responsible for Jimmy’s death! Have a good afternoon!’

‘What are you-’ Sarah asked him, but she did not need a spoken answer from Brian when the boy marched to the door of her office. Brian heard her calling out his name and saying something about putting this on his record if he had the courage to leave now. The mere idea of this made Brian snicker in between all of the anger and frustration he felt; as if being marked down as absent or uncooperative for a therapy session was something he even remotely cared about at the moment.

‘While you’re at it, you might as well mark me absent for the rest of the week, because I’m not coming!’ was the last thing Brian shared with his psychiatrist, before he tore the door of her office open. Without hesitating for even a second (out of fear he would change his mind and his conscience would make him drag himself back inside the room and apologise to Sarah), he smashed the door close behind him. Apologies would come later; now was the time for him to have a moment of piece and quiet to hopefully calm himself down after the events that had passed between now and roughly ten minutes ago.

Brian staggered to the other side of the hallway, where he turned around, let his back bump up against the grey brick wall, and let his body slide down until he was sitting on the floor. When after about ten seconds of silence he was positive Sarah was not going to follow him outside of her office (there was at least one hint his psychiatrist seemed to understand, he thought to himself), he covered his face with his hands, drawing small circles on his painful forehead with his middle fingers.

God, that had been one ugly situation he had just dragged himself into. Brian had no idea where the sudden aggression and frustration had come from - or, to be more exact, why it had come out all of the sudden. He had felt hopeless and empty for days, five days to be exact, after Jimmy’s suicide, and never had he said more than a few words to anyone at the time. Whether it had been his psychiatrist, Jasper and Ariel at group therapy, Freddie and Roger, the lunch ladies in the canteen, random people in the hallway who had heard that he had been the first one to find Jimmy’s body; Brian always tried to cut everyone off before they could even expect an answer from him. The only one he did not do this to was John, and not even so much because he preferred having John around to having anyone else buzzing around him (although Brian had to admit that this kind of was the case), but mainly because John had so far not given him a reason to cut him off mid-sentence and get away from him. John seemed to understand he needed time to think, to think on his own without all kinds of people randomly presenting themselves to him and trying to talk to him, and therefore so far had not bothered him. All he had said to Brian was ‘you know where I am when you need me’,  and though this might have sounded cruel and uninterested, it was the only reaction Brian had been able to appreciate so far. It was the only reaction that showed that the speaker of it cared about Brian’s needs, and not about satisfying their own nosiness.

Speaking of nosiness… The moment Brian thought about how everyone apart from John so far had been showing up and trying to make him speak up, a familiar voice called out to him and distracted Brian from his circle of thoughts.

‘Lord, that did not sound too good! Should I even dare ask you what happened in there?’

Brian looked up to look at the person who had just spoken to him, even though he did not necessarily have to - the liveliness of the voice told him that it could be no one else than Freddie. One glance in the direction of the sound was enough to confirm this assumption; his roommate came walking towards him from the other side of the hallway, his smile bright and his limbs swimming in the clothes that would be tight-fitting on anyone else save the anorexic boy.

‘What are _you_ doing here?’ Brian asked Freddie, who by now had made his way over to him.

‘Coming to pick you up. Literally,’ Freddie said with a smile as he reached out a hand to help Brian get up from the floor he had gotten down on a moment before, before he had been aware of the unexpected (and more than that, unwelcome) presence of his roommate. Freddie’s smile faltered a bit when Brian stared at the hand as if he would sooner rip it off Freddie’s body than hold onto it.

‘I told you I didn’t want you to come over here-’ Brian grumbled, but he cut himself off when yet another silhouette appeared from the same direction out of which Freddie had presented himself a moment before. Brian could only growl in frustration when Roger staggered up to him.

‘But we wanted to see if maybe you’d talk today!’ Roger explained in a whiny voice of which Brian was sure it would have given him a headache - if he hadn’t been having one already following his altercation with Sarah mere minutes ago.

‘And apparently you did,’ Freddie jumped in on his partner’s words. ‘Either Sarah has become delusional and started yelling at herself, or she’s somehow managed to get you to talk.’

‘More than that. _Shout_ ,’ Roger corrected him with a grin. The couple shared a few more words on the topic of Sarah having managed to drag him into talking, but Brian was no longer listening. All he wanted was for either Freddie and Roger to leave, and, if they were determined to stay here, he would gladly leave this abandoned hallway himself.

‘Guys, I told you I didn’t want you here,’ Brian growled as he pushed himself back up to his feet with his hands, determined not to use the help of Freddie’s hand, which was still stretched out into his direction to help him. This hand seemed like a metaphor to Brian; he knew Freddie (and Roger, too, for that matter) wanted nothing else than help him through their attempts of talking to him, cheering him up, and, as it turned out, following him - however, all he had been asking for was for everyone to let him be for the time being. Was that really so difficult a request to listen to and carry out?

‘But Brian…’ Freddie started with a sigh, like he must have done at least ten times on that particular day alone - and for which Brian lost more and more consideration every single time. ‘We just want to cheer you up!’

‘I don’t want to be cheered up! I want to be left alone!’ Brian snapped, by now no longer able to contain his anger any longer. The fact that his outburst seemed to make Freddie take a step back in surprise towards this unexpected reaction, was not something Brian cared even the least about in the given situation. Over the past handful of days Freddie and Roger had not seemed to care about what he wanted either, so why should be concerned about their feelings?

‘You’ve been wanted to leave alone for five days!’ Roger brought up in protest.

‘Yes, and I want to be left alone for five more days!’ Brian replied. He looked around to find that the hallway was practically empty, save one more man waiting for his therapist to let him into the office. There was nothing blocking him from simply running away from these two; and, if he judged the situation correctly, there was no one they could possibly chase up with him if he would leave all at once. Admitted, Roger had completely recovered from his slip into his heroin addiction, which had happened about a week ago, and was therefore not as weak and shaky as he had been the days before. Still, Brian was rather sure he would be out of breath in no time if he would force his weakened body to run after him - not to even mention Freddie, whom Brian expected would simply collapse if he would have to do as much as sprint towards the end of the hallway. The idea of simply running away became more and more tempting to Brian, especially when Freddie started another monologue about how it was not good for him to lock himself out of society after Jimmy’s death.

‘Brian, you can’t go on like this. You have to talk to someone, to your psychiatrist, or Nolan, or us-’

‘I don’t have to do anything. Just leave me alone,’ Brian said, his voice not even sounding unkind this time - which he hoped would make up for the fact that he walked past them, and once he was a few metres away from them, started running towards the end of the hallway.

‘Brian, where are you- come back here!’

Brian heard Freddie calling out his name and demanding him to come back and talk to him, but he was pretty sure he had not felt like disobeying an order as badly as this in quite a long time. Instead of slowing down, Brian sped up - which seemed to be necessary, given that he heard two pairs of footsteps following him down the hallway. He was quick to push open the swing doors, and when he did not hear them fall shut but instead by caught by either Freddie or Roger, he knew they were close to him. Their strength surprised them; Brian did not think they would have made the effort, let alone to actually go after him. The fact that they were running after him (and on top of that, that they threatened to catch up to him) was unexpected, but it gave Brian all the more reasons to keep on running as fast as he could in an attempt to shake them off.

‘Brian, stop! You’re being ridiculous!’ Brian heard one of his two roommates yelling at him, but in the heat of the moment, he could not make up who it was. He reached the stairs and gripped onto the handrail next to it, passing two steps at once in order to make it to the top - and, with that, to the dorm rooms - as fast as he could. Luckily, Freddie and Roger were both not as tall as him, and could not follow his example, causing them to lose some of their speed while Brian already made his way through the second pair of swing doors. He received a few confused glances from two boys walking towards the doors, especially when they had to make way for Freddie and Roger as they ran after their victim, but all Brian was focussed on was reaching the end of this hallway, to rip the door to their bedroom open, shut it behind him, and make sure he did not have to talk to Roger and Freddie. He knew he could not be silent forever, and especially not to those two, but God, right now really was not the moment to lay his soul bare to either of them.

Brian dug into the back pocket of his jeans to fish out the key to the room. Freddie and Roger’s voices and footsteps followed him close behind, and he felt especially nervous when he had to decrease his speed once he neared their dorm room. Refusing to look at his ever-nearing followers, he pushed the key into the lock with shaky hands, frantically trying to turn it around. Brian felt his heart skip a beat out of relief when the lock finally gave in, and he pushed the door open with a lot more power than necessary. He almost tumbled into the room, but was quick to pull himself together and press the door close - right in time, this turned out to be. The moment Brian pushed the door into the frame again, the handle moved down, announcing that his followers had caught up with him at last. Brian threw his entire body against the door as either Roger or Freddie (or the both, judging by the amount of knocks that crashed down on the surface of the door) were trying to open it with whatever strength they possessed in their body. It wasn’t much, but they were stubborn enough to keep on trying for what seemed like an eternity to Brian, who closed his eyes and wished they would just go away and leave him alone.

‘Lock the door and leave the key in it. They can’t open the door that way.’

Brian opened his eyes and looked around the room. There was no one to be seen at first, but he knew it could be no one else but John, who was - according to custom - lying on his bed, hands folded over his chest, staring at the ceiling above him. In his hurry to find shelter from the two people chasing after him, he had not even considered the possibility of his third roommate being in the dorm room. Then again, where else had he expected John to be? If he did not have counselling, therapy, or some other activity he had to show up at, he was most likely to be found in their bedroom. This afternoon was no exception to this overall rule.

Another fist aimed at the door brought Brian back to reality. Continuing to press the door close with his body, he used the key he was still holding in the by now clammy palm of his hand and pressed it into the lock. His fingers were still shaking slightly when he turned it around and he hardly dared to test if John’s advice was actually working. Eventually he did slowly shift his weight away from the door, and upon seeing that it did not open no matter how much the pair at the other side of the wall tried, he stepped away from it with a sigh of relief. When even Freddie and Roger’s attempt to push their key into the lock did not get them anywhere, as John had predicted, Brian allowed himself to let go of the door completely.

‘That’s something I’d been wanting to do for months but never had the courage to,’ John sighed. ‘Gotta love me some peace of mind every now and then,’ he said as he tucked his hands under his head, as if he was lying at the beach of Venice instead of in his bed in a mental institution. It was not quite the same, but when the beating at the door and the angry voices died out and Brian lay down on his own bed, he had to admit that it could indeed be quite peaceful around here - if you happened to find the right place at the right moment in time. And, if this was nowhere to be found, you could always create it yourself, Brian thought to himself as he gave one last look at the key lodging in the lock of the door.

Feeling like he was being stared at, Brian turned away from the door to instead look at the boy lying in the bed next to his. He found his hypothesis to be correct; John was looking at him, something Brian did not find awkward per se but which did make him face away. It was as if John was checking him out in an attempt to find out what was wrong with him, what the reason behind him suddenly bursting into the dorm room and locking out the rest of their roommates could be.

However, as much as John looked at him and was probably making mental conclusions, he did not ask Brian any questions. He did not ask questions any other person would have fired upon Brian at this moment, such as ‘Wasn’t your therapy session supposed to last longer?’, ‘Do you want to talk?’, or ‘Why did you run from Freddie and Roger?’. It didn’t matter to John - or perhaps it did matter, perhaps he was curious to get an answer to all of these questions, but he was not nosy enough to ask. But more than that, John seemed to sense that right now was not the time to drag Brian into a discussion about any of these topics, and especially not about the topic everyone knew had been on Brian’s mind ever since five days ago.

‘Want me to leave?’ was the one thing John asked Brian. Even though this was all he wanted to know about Brian and though this might have come across as careless if anyone else but John would have said it, Brian could appreciate this question more than any other one in the world right now. It showed that John was not concerned about getting answers to the questions he liked to know to feed his own nosiness (like Freddie and Roger seemed to be doing), but that he was actually concerned about what Brian himself wanted from him at the moment. It made Brian feel like there was at least someone listening to what he wanted at the moment.

And even though he had been running away from his psychiatrist, Freddie, and Roger, Brian came to the conclusion that he did not want to be alone. He just wanted to be with the right people - and, at the moment, the term ‘right people’ included exactly one person, and that person was John.

‘No. I want you to stay,’ Brian whispered, hoping he did not come across as too sentimental when he did so. He did not want to lay a claim upon John, or drag him into the drama that Freddie, Roger, and he had gotten themselves into a moment ago. Luckily, John did not seem to be worried about any of this; he gave Brian a bit of a smile before he turned around in bed to look at the ceiling again.

‘Alright. You know I’m right here,’ John told him, which were the last words he spoke before he slipped into his state of what many people would assume was mental unconsciousness. Brian, however, knew better than that by now. John was never absent-minded, never locked himself away from the world to the degree where he would not be aware of the world around him. He possessed the ability to ignore all that did not matter, and was perfectly aware of the things everybody else could not see in between the trivialities they focussed on. It was a talent Brian had found himself wishing more people had for years in a row. However, he knew he was lucky to have found John, someone who finally conformed to what he was looking for in a person, a roommate, a friend even.

A friend. He had not really thought of any of the people at this place as being his friends - or more than that, of his own capability of becoming friends with anyone. Even more than that, he was unsure how someone as emotionally detached as John felt towards the concept of friendship, let alone with someone who was the complete opposite as him in terms of mental state. Still, moments like these - John helping him escape Freddie and John, John talking to him at night, John taking him outside to show him the gardens, John helping him out at group therapy sessions - made Brian believe that if he had to pick anyone in this place to be the one he felt most closely attached to, that he felt like he could call his friend, it would be John.

‘I know,’ he whispered at John, and he felt a strange sort of tension falling off his shoulders. Knowing that John was right with him when he needed him, both physically and mentally, was all Brian could have asked for to feel like he was not going under even in a rough time like this.

# # #

The incident of Brian having ran out of the therapy room and, additionally, from his roommates as they had waited on him outside the office, was soon forgotten. Or perhaps forgotten was not the right word - all parties involved remembered it, but none of them seemed to be especially keen on bringing it up to Brian. John had eventually granted their roommates access to their room again with the note and warning that now was not the right time to make a fuss over Brian having locked them out. They had not bothered him about it for the rest of the day - and, when Freddie had shortly flagged it up during an awkwardly quiet breakfast setting the following morning, a quick apology from both sides was all that was needed to move on to Freddie’s usual topic of counting the calories in the meals of himself and all the other people around him. Group therapy was nothing new; just a pair of overly enthusiastic group leaders trying to move a dozen of patients into speaking up.

A dozen minus one, that was.

After an hour of sitting around in a circle that seemed incomplete now that the chair next to Brian  remained empty, he had moved towards his therapy session. Even though he had claimed the day before that he was not showing up for the remainder of the week, Brian knew that he had little choice; it was either going to see Sarah, or having whatever kind of counsellor prying into his personal business. No matter how much he dreaded getting to stand eye to eye with the person he had walked out on the day before, it still seemed like a better option to him than being hauled into a trajectory of counselling for failing to attend his daily activities.

Fortunately, Sarah did not seem to be angry at him anymore; if anything, she looked hesitant, somewhat hurt perhaps, which Brian soon found was even worse than having her be mad at him for the way he had acted towards her the day before. He hated the idea that he was disappointing people, letting them down, or hurting them, and therefore could do nothing but follow her into her office and mumble a short and unspecific ‘sorry’ at Sarah that did not mention the reason for the apology, but of which the both of them knew what it referred to.

Still, no matter how bad Brian felt for having acted cruelly towards her the day before, his guilt did not manage to push him into talking to Sarah this session either. He continued his silence towards both the topic of Jimmy’s death and towards whatever other conversation Sarah tried to bring up, much to the psychiatrist’s frustration. It was another hour of quietness in which Brian did not do more than say yes or no or shrug every now and then to confirm or deny statements Sarah made. Both of them seemed to be relieved when the clock struck eleven and when he thus was allowed to leave.

The hallway was crowded like it always was when people rotated between activities. It was something Brian was positive he was never going to enjoy, but he was managing more and more each day to pass between the multitudes and escape the main hallway and move upstairs instead. The moment he passed the swing doors, he found that the hallways upstairs were almost empty, which came as a relief to him. Most patients probably had activities to go to; therapy, counselling, corvee, or whatever kind of meetings Brian was all too happy he did not have to attend at this specific point in time. Right now was time to go to his room, sit back, and forget about social activities until lunch would come up and force him to be among people again.

Brian had everything all planned out; how he would have over an hour of time on his own before duty would call again, how he could sit in his room in silence - apart from the detail that he was not the only one who seemed to have considered he was going to be in their bedroom. The moment he unlocked the door and pushed it open, he was greeted by the sight of all his three roommates, having gathered around Roger’s bed and seeming engaged in some kind of board game. Or perhaps they were not so much engaged in the game as in the question of when their last roommate would show up to their place; the moment he walked through the door, all three of them (or well, Freddie and Roger anyway) turned around as if they had been awaiting for him to arrive for some time.

‘There you are! Will you come join us?’ Freddie asked before Brian was even given the chance to dump his keys on his nightstand. Brian did not feel like it, but decided to glance their way anyway; he was, after all, kind of curious to see what they were doing. This was not so much a result of their game looking so interesting, but of Freddie and Roger somehow having managed to drag John, who never seemed to be up to do anything with the couple, into their game. The box lying on the floor next to the bed suggested that it was Scrabble, a game Brian remembered having played a lot in his youth. Now, however, he was not so keen on playing it, and rejected Freddie’s request with a shake of his head before he got down on his bed.

‘Ah, won’t you play with us?’ Freddie asked him with what Brian - judging from the corners of his eyes - thought was a pout. Unfortunately for his roommate, it had little effect on Brian, who just shook his head again.

‘Come on, Brian,’ Roger insisted. ‘Even John agreed to join!’ he said, which Brian had to agree was a bit of a miracle indeed. Still it did not change his mind - especially not when he heard the reason behind John’s ‘willingness’ to participate in their game.

‘You threatened to cut off my hair in my sleep,’ John reminded him in a grumble as he brought his fingers up to his hair as to make sure if Roger had not in some kind of miraculous way managed to take revenge on John through the means of his hair. Roger just gave a shrug as a wordless reply, obviously thinking that threatening to cut off John’s locks was a necessary evil for the goal of persuading Brian to come and join them in their game and make him speak up to them. This was, at least, what Brian assumed was what they were trying to achieve by all playing Scrabble together; he could not come up with another reason as to why they had been needing John to join them in a game he obviously did not. After all, if even John could be made to join a social activity, then surely anyone else could be moved into doing the same, right?

Fortunately, Freddie seemed to be the first one to find out that this kind of logic did not work on Brian at the moment - or at least, the first one to admit out loud that their plan was failing.

‘So you don’t like board games, then?’ he asked as he turned around to face Brian, who had gotten down on his bed and did not look back at him.

‘Not at the moment,’ Brian mumbled unenthusiastically, which was the truth - he did not mind playing games, but really, right now was not the right moment. He did not feel like making fun while all he could think of was how he had failed to protect someone from taking their own life. If only he would have stepped up earlier, or done more than just freeing Jimmy from Drew’s grip as a whole and not just at the one moment when Drew was actively abusing him. If only he would have reached out to Nolan, or Sarah, or any other kind of authority that could have stepped in and help-

‘That’s not a word,’ Roger said to Freddie loudly enough to interrupt Brian’s thoughts. Even though he was not particularly interested in whatever word it was that kept his roommates busy, he could not block out their loud voices as they quarrelled about whether or not Freddie’s latest creation cold pass for a word or not.

‘’An?’ Of course ‘an’ is a word!’ Freddie replied indignantly.

‘What on earth is an ‘an’?’

‘It’s an article! _An_ apple, _an_ agent, _an_ evening,’ Freddie summed up in an attempt to educate his boyfriend on the basics of English sentence analysis, but Roger continued to look at him somewhat dazedly. ‘You literally just used it yourself when you said ‘an an’! _An_ emergency, _an_ accident…’

‘ _An_ anorexic disorder, _an_ alcohol addiction…’ John casually added to the list as he rearranged the little wooden blocks with letters carved into it that he had yet to use in upcoming turns. Whereas his examples sure were valid, Roger was not too pleased with them.

‘It was heroin, smartass,’ Roger replied somewhat grumpily, obviously sensing John’s choice of words were directed at him and his boyfriend.

‘As if you didn’t down a bottle of vodka on top of that at times,’ John reminded him in reply. It would have made Brian snicker at any other moment in time, if it wouldn’t have been for the heaviness he felt himself, and for the fact that tensions seemed to be rising in the room. John had probably intended the mentioning of anorexia and an alcohol addiction as a (be it somewhat misplaced) joke, but Roger obviously had not taken it as such, which by now made the pair of them look at each other rather coldly. Normally spoken Brian would have attempted to change the subject to something else to get everyone’s mind off the matter; right now, however, he preferred not to talk at all. The three of them could solve the situation on their own perfectly well without him, he reasoned.

‘Either way, I think we’ve proven that ‘an’ is a word,’ Freddie concluded after a few seconds of tensed silence. ‘Your turn, John.’

Roger and John continued playing their game wordlessly; Freddie was the only one who - as usual - tried to keep the conversation and the atmosphere up. Unfortunately for him, none of his roommates were especially helpful to him that day. Normally he could count on Roger to talk to him, or at the very least at Brian who could not stand awkward silences. But now that Roger was not speaking anymore after his little altercation with John, and Brian did not engage in whatever the three of them were up to altogether, Freddie mainly found himself talking to himself. It was only after multiple attempts of making Brian speak up (and being met with awkward silence) that Freddie finally said something that managed to attract Brian’s attention and interest, even.

‘John told me you play guitar.’

Brian turned his head to the side to look at the speaker of the words, only to find that Freddie had already turned back to the board game in front of him again. Roger wasn’t looking in his direction either, but John was, for a change. Brian was met with a pair of green-brown eyes that looked most apologetically when his youngest roommate and he crossed looks.

‘Forgive me. He tickled me into telling me what could cheer you up,’ John said with a nod at Freddie, who offered him a kissy hand before he spelled out whatever kind of word he’d just come up with. He did not at all seem worried about how Brian would react to hearing that John had told the rest he played guitar. Then again, this was probably only logical; Freddie after all, had not told the boys anything personal about Brian, that had been John. Freddie was finding himself in a safe position - if Brian would get angry at anyone, it would be no one else than John.

Luckily for John, Brian found that he had no reason for being angry at him. He was unsure if this was the result of the matter John had spoken of being so innocent, if because he knew John would never have harmful intentions towards him, or if because it was John, rather than anyone else he might not have taken this breach of trust from. More than not being angry, Brian could actually not prevent a small smile from spreading across his lips when he let John’s words rotate through his brain for a moment. The mental image of Freddie tickling John until he would beg for mercy was too much for Brian to be unmoved by, even if it involved John telling Freddie some personal data about him.

Brian did not get much time to smile about the thought of Freddie making an apparently ticklish John squeal; before he could really think of what the scene in the bedroom must have looked like before he entered, Freddie dropped a line that required Brian’s attention.

‘Either way, I was happy to hear you play music, because we do, too.’

Brian glanced up at Freddie, who did look at him this time. Brian hoped Freddie could not see that this sentence had sparked his interest, because he still was not exactly in the mood for being entertained and consequently being interrogated about how he felt, which Brian knew was the aim of his roommates by this entire puppet show. Still… He low-key wanted to know if what Freddie had just told him was just another attempt at making him speak out loud, or if the rest of the people he shared a room with actually had a musical background. It was not so much that Brian was interested in playing music at the given moment, and most of all not with his roommates, but it was as if his artistical, musical site forced him to find out a bit more about Freddie’s claim nevertheless.

‘You play? Together?’ Brian asked as casually as possible.

‘Well, apart from John, being the usual spoilsport,’ Freddie said teasingly to John, who - in an unusually playful moment - stuck his tongue out at him. ‘But I sing and Roger plays the drums. The latter is rather hard around here, but plates, lids, and pencils usually get you a long way,’ Freddie gave a nod at his bed, under which they apparently stored the items Brian assumed they must have confiscated from the canteen at some point. ‘Either way, we didn’t have a guitar player around yet. So if Roger drums, and I sing, and you play guitar-’

This last planning of what seemed to be an upcoming band practice was going entirely too fast for Brian, who did not mean to involve himself in any of Freddie’s wild plans - and especially not at this particular moment in time.

‘I _used_ to,’ Brian corrected Freddie quietly, yet still loud enough for Freddie to turn around and look at him with a questioning expression on his face. ‘I don’t play anymore,’ Brian clarified, which pulled a very upset looking expression from his roommate.

‘You didn’t give it up, now did you? That’d be such a shame!’ Freddie nearly exclaimed. Even Roger’s face seemed to hint at disappointment, which made it impossible for Brian to lie and tell them he had completely given up on playing guitar.

‘I didn’t mean to stop, it’s just… I wasn’t allowed to take it with me,’ Brian shrugged in an attempt to make it look like it did not matter too much to him - while in fact, now that he thought about it, it _did_ bother him. Playing guitar had always been his hobby, his distraction, his time-killing device, the thing that could cheer him up when he was down. Of course fiddling around with his guitar would not magically decrease the sorrow and guilt he felt towards Jimmy’s death, but having it here perhaps could have made him feel a little less helpless than he currently did. It would give him something else to do besides staring at a wall, which - after having done so for five days - was not so interesting anymore.

‘I should have expected that. This place is a total disaster,’ Freddie said as he rolled his eyes, displaying obvious frustration towards the institution they were currently finding themselves in. Then, noticing he was losing Brian’s attention as the other boy sank back into his own thoughts again, he proposed: ‘But perhaps we can arrange something. Who knows what we might find in the canteen, right?’

‘Who knows,’ Brian mumbled after a handful of seconds of silence. He was not at all excited about the plan; first of all because building a guitar out of cutlery seemed like an impossible task to him, and secondly, because social contact was not at all something he was craving at the moment. He just wished to be left alone, to have everyone leave the room and go to their therapy sessions or God knew where more they had to go to, so he could lie in bed and think of Jimmy. Of how he had failed to protect him, of how he still would have been alive if Brian had only done more for him. What if Brian would have asked around for Jimmy’s room number, so he could have checked in on him after the group therapy session he had not shown up to? What if he had gone to the bathroom before John and he had gone outside? What if he could have prevented Jimmy from hanging himself, or caught him mid-action and still would have been able to save him-

‘You don’t seem too excited,’ Freddie remarked, interrupting Brian’s whirlwind of thoughts. ‘Why not? What’s wrong?’

‘Perhaps that someone _died_ because of me,’ Brian gritted out, which immediately dissolved whatever small amount of positive attitude was still to be found in their dorm room. Freddie seemed to share a concerned look with John, but Roger was not joining them.

‘Not again…’ Roger sighed, which earned him a poke against his ribcage with Freddie’s bony elbow.

‘You shut your mouth,’ Freddie hissed, obviously not wanting to shut Brian up before he even got around to talk again. Brian could see where both men came from; the handful of times that he had spoken of something during the last few days all had been about publicly blaming himself for not having been able to save Jimmy from hanging himself, and it was understandable that Roger did not want to hear this anymore. On the other side, Freddie had been working very hard on creating situations in which Brian would be willing to talk (such as the current Scrabble situation) and was not letting a fed-up partner push Brian back into silence.

‘That is not true at all, Brian, and you know it,’ Freddie said, mildly accusative towards the fact that he had told Brian so a hundred times before. ‘He did not die because of you - the opposite is true. If anyone in this place saved him, it was you.’

‘Then why did he still die if I saved him?’ Brian said while crossing his arms over his chest and giving Freddie an impatient look. He knew he was coming across as more bitchy than he intended to, but he could not find the power within himself to return to his usual, calm state of being. People had called him a hero when he had stood up for Jimmy against Drew, which was something Brian at the time did not want to believe but which he could get into now. Now that the victim had taken his own life however, he found it impossible to think anything positive of his rescue action. What kind of hero was he if the person he had been supposed to protect had taken their own life?

‘Because he was too far gone to be saved from himself, Brian,’ Freddie told him. Judging by the calmness and composedness of his voice, Brian assumed that Freddie seemed to think his own words to be very smart and logical, but to Brian they made absolutely no sense. How on earth were the concepts ‘having saved someone’ and ‘the same person being beyond rescue’ compatible in the brain of his roommate?

‘So his death was unavoidable?’ Brian asked him sitting upright on his bed by now and shooting Freddie a deadly glare he knew the boy did not deserve but which he could not keep himself from making right now. ‘We were all just waiting on it to happen? As some kind of stay of execution?’

‘Of course not!’ Freddie shot back at him. ‘You know that’s not what I mean!’

‘Then what is it what you mean?’ Brian dared Freddie to explain himself. However, just when he was prepared to listen to how his roommate was planning to talk himself out of this situation, the conversation was put to a halt by a force both of them had already forgotten about by the time he spoke up.

‘Let him be, Freddie. This is not the right moment,’ John interrupted the boy sitting across from him at the table, which made everyone in the room - including Brian - look up at him. They were not used to John interfering with anything they did, but even this did not prevent Freddie from only needing a second to talk back to John.

‘Then when will be the right moment? It’s been five days!’ Freddie reminded him in a voice that to Brian seemed loud enough for the people next door to hear, but which still did not manage to leave an impression on John, who was imperturbable in his opinion that they should leave Brian alone and wait until he would come to them to talk instead of the other way around.

‘When he’s ready for it, it’ll be the right moment,’ John said with a nod and a bit of a smile at Brian, who mumbled a wordless thank you at his roommate. No matter how much he liked hearing how Freddie wanted to defend his position as a saviour whose victims died, being left alone was still what Brian preferred in the current state of affairs.

‘If we leave it up to him, it can easily last another month,’ Freddie brought in, but John wasn’t convinced by his line of reasoning.

‘It won’t,’ he simply said while rearranging the letters on the wooden blocks in front of him.

‘How do you know?’ Freddie wanted to know.

‘Trust me,’ John said to Freddie, but he did not look at him when he spoke to him. Instead, he looked at Brian - stared him deep into his eyes, rather. Brian felt awkward under John’s intense stare, but he could not look away from him and the miniscule smile playing on his lips as he ensured Freddie: ‘It won’t take long.’

# # #

In the end, John turned out to be right. John _always_ seemed to be right when it came to him, that was something Brian had gotten used to, but he had not thought that his moment of breaking down and talking to people was going to come around as quickly as that very night.

Watching the alarm clock on his nightstand jumping from 23:59 to 00:00, Brian waited for the chiming of the church bells to fill the quiet space around him. Nothing happened, as usual, and Brian quietly sighed to himself. He had always been so used to hearing the sound of church bells with every hour that passed while he was lying in bed waiting for sleep that would never come; so much that he could not accustom himself to the idea that there was no sound to be heard at Queen Mary’s whenever an hour of time went by. They were much too far away from a church, a village, or any kind of society to hear bells chiming. In fact, they were buried too far into the middle of nowhere that Brian was positive that an atom bomb could be dropped on the capital and they would be none the wiser for the first three days following.

Brian shook off the thought of atom bombs and shifted around in his bed. He had been tossing and turning for hours in his attempts to fall asleep, none of which so far had been effective. He was cold and tired and wanted nothing more than to just let his body slip into unconsciousness, but he seemed unable to. Whenever he closed his eyes, the image of Jimmy’s lifeless body hanging from the bathroom ceiling painted itself in his vision, making him snap open his eyes just as fast as he had closed them the moment before. However, after a while, Brian found that opening his eyes did not work anymore to rule it out anymore; the image had been woven into his mind, settled in his brain, was driving him _insane_. It didn’t let go of him anymore; no matter what side he turned to or which dark corner of the room he let his weary eyes focus on, the body on a rope followed him, tortured him, spoke to him.

 _You killed me,_ it said to him. _If you would have stood up I would not have died._

Brian threw the duvets away with a violent motion of his hand and swung his bare legs over the edge of the mattress. His head felt warm and his mind was clouded, as if his brainpan was filled with cotton wool. His ears had started buzzing and his tongue felt dry, and all the time, the voice of that unknown entity followed him and whispered into his ear.

_Murdered. Murderer. Murderer._

_I’m losing my Godforsaken mind here,_ Brian thought as he massaged his forehead with his fingertips. He was losing his mind, bit by bit, and he had no idea what to do to hold on to the last traces of his sanity. He needed help, he needed someone to bring him back to mental health again-

‘John? John, are you awake?’ Brian craned his neck and asked towards the general direction of John’s bed, but he received no response from his roommate. The snoring coming from the opposite side of the room indicated that Freddie and Roger were also sound asleep, which in turn meant that Brian was entirely alone in this dark and cruel night, in which the thoughts of Jimmy’s life and death would not let him be. Brian buried his face in his hands; John had been his only hope, the only person he thought could make a difference for him in a situation like this. The only one he would have been willing to talk about his feelings to at this moment. But John was temporarily unavailable, and Brian did not know what he could do to gain back peace of mind. All he realised was that he would not gain it back in this room. He needed to get away, and preferably as fast as possible.

Careful not to wake up any of the people around him, Brian pushed himself off the bed and tiptoed into what he remembered was to be the direction of the door. The one hand he used to find his way with soon bumped up to the wooden door, and he let his fingers trail lower until they eventually closed themselves around the key Brian was happy someone had left in the lock; if they hadn’t, he had no idea how to find it without putting on the light and waking up his roommates. But now, he could almost soundlessly unlock the door, push it open, and slip outside the room before anyone would notice.

The overhead lighting in the hallway had been dimmed for the nightly hours, but coming from an entirely dark room, it was still bright enough to make Brian squint slightly. The linoleum floor was cold below his bare feet, so Brian made sure to be quick with closing the door and going on his way. Where was something he did not know yet, and which did not matter much to him either. He just needed to get away from the bedroom in which the ghost of Jimmy seemed to be haunting him, this night even more than during the previous ones. 

Even though he knew exactly which way to go and where everything was on the first floor, everything looked oddly unfamiliar to Brian at night. It was as if just the lightning - or lack thereof, rather - created a scene entirely different from the one Brian was used to seeing during the day. He had not left the dorm room at night before, and seeing the greyish brick walls and matching linoleum floors in the semi-darkness reminded him of why exactly this was. Sure, he did not like having people running around him everywhere he went, but being all alone in this hallway turned out to be even worse. He could swear he saw shadows on the wall behind him, which disappeared whenever he turned around and made their way back into the building or into his brain every time he continued his way to a destination he had yet to figure out. All that was important now was that he got away from this hallway, from this floor, and the only way of doing that was by going through the swing doors and running downstairs. Perhaps that somewhere on the ground floor he could find rest, a place away from the voices and shadows that were hunting him at this place.

With renewed speed, Brian made his way through the main hallway of the first floor. He had given up on tiptoeing in order to make sure no one would hear him; he was in a hurry to get away from this place, and even if someone would wake up from hearing footsteps in the hallway, he already would be gone by the time they would have gotten up to check what was going on outside their dorm room. They probably weren’t even going to check if something was happening; no one at this place would probably even care if he would set himself on fire, let alone that they would blink an eye now that he was running around the labyrinth of hallway in the middle of the night because guilt and regret were tearing him apart.

The swing doors appeared at the end of the hallway, and Brian rushed towards them as if they could disappear any moment. With his hands already stretched out towards the doors he approached them so that he would be able to push them open and escape from the first floor the second he would stand in front of those gates that would grant him freedom. Running was something he didn’t do on a regular basis and he found himself out of breath, but he told himself it was just gonna be a few more meters, a few more metres before he would reach the doors, place his hands on them, and push them open…

Brian executed his plan exactly how he had had it in mind, and yet the moment he laid his hands on the iron door handle, something went wrong. Something he hadn’t taken into account, but something obvious that was very much opposing his plan of action as it was right now.

The doors were locked.

It took a moment for Brian to have the realisation of this dawn in on him as he stood pushing at the swinging doors that would not grant him access to the hallway and stairs behind them. For a moment he thought he had lost all of his physical power, or his mind - or a combination of both factors - after all, how could a pair of swing doors not cooperate? But when he gave himself a second to figure out the cause of the doors not acting according to their function, Brian could see through the armoured glass that an iron bar had been put through the door handles of the doors, which prevented them from swinging open. It was a simple yet effective trick to lock the doors from one side without the people on the other side being able to do anything about it. It was a clever trick from whoever had come up with it, but it was simultaneously one Brian hated, now that it prevented him from getting out of this hellish place.

‘Hello? Is anybody there?’ he called out to the other side, even though he knew there was no way anyone would hear him. Even if the sound of his voice would manage to travel through the armoured glass of the swing doors, the dorm rooms for the night staff were too far away to ever hear him. More than that, the last thing he wanted was to be standing eye in eye with the staff who would probably just tell him to go back to bed, or, worse than that, take him into isolation for being up and running around the place past midnight.

Still, Brian could not help himself; he wanted to get away from this hellish floor, needed to find a place for himself where he could think without feeling like other people could wake up and ask him what was going on any given moment. He needed to get away from this place, needed to find a way to get behind these stupid swing doors that had been closed by God knew who…

‘Let me out!’ Brian called out to no one in particular as he let his fist crash down on the door handle. He put his grazed knuckles to his lips and bit down his lower lip; that hurt more than he had imagined, and he had to prevent himself from groaning in pain. But it felt good somehow, somewhere deep inside, so he repeated the action of bashing against the door a number of times in a row while simultaneously shouting at whoever could hear him to help him get out of this Godforsaken place. He completely lost himself in his task of trying to bump open the door; in fact, he was so engaged in the task he knew was useless but could not give up on, that he did not hear the footsteps of someone creeping up on him from behind until the very moment the person placed a hand on his shoulder. The unexpected touch startled Brian, but not enough to turn around and forsake his action of repeatedly banging against the doors that still did not move a single inch, no matter how badly he assaulted them.

‘Brian? Brian, what are you doing?’ The voice was familiar, but Brian did not care to look up and find out whose it was. Only when he lashed out at the door another time and the person caught his fist between his hands, Brian momentarily stopped. Initially it was because this person was literally restraining him from moving forwards with his plan, but when he discovered who it was, he fell sound- and motionless for a moment.

‘Let go of me! I need to…’ The fingers that had wrapped themselves around his fist were pale and not very remarkable, but those lower arms he would recognise everywhere he would go, even though he had only seen them once. Still, that one time had been enough to imprint the sight of them in Brian’s mind forevermore - the welts, the marks, the cuts, and the scars that ran over pale skin in completely random patterns, making it look so fragile and so delicate that Brian was afraid the skin would tear and burst if he would pull his arm away from the grip the other man had over him. Therefore he did not move for the time being, and simply stared at the boy who was holding him captive both literally and figuratively.

‘John?’ Brian asked softly, lowering his hand down from the door. ‘What are you doing…?’

‘I could ask you the same,’ John said in a voice that was soft yet stern. He obviously wanted an explanation as to why Brian had gotten out of bed and was banging at the door at a quarter past twelve at night, so Brian decided to give him one.

‘I need to get out of here, John,’ he confided to his roommate. ‘I can’t hold out at this place for a second longer!’ he said in a shrill voice that at the given moment surprised himself more than it did John, who remained perfectly calm in the midst of the chaos Brian was creating. ‘How do you… there must be a way to get out of here,’ he said in full conviction as he took back his hand and gave another blow at the door that did more to hurt him personally than it did to make the door move. Frustrated by the immovability of the door, Brian repeated the action, and did it again, and again, until John eventually tried to put a halt on it.

‘There’s a night lock on these doors, Brian, to prevent people from roaming around,’ John whispered while he stretched out his arms to try and capture Brian’s hands again. ‘You can’t open…’

‘They have to open!’ Brian shouted a lot louder than he had intended to do, so he continued in a softer but just as confidential voice: ‘They _have_ to open someway, I just need to figure… figure out how.’ His fingers were clawing at the opening of the door by now. For a moment he thought the reddish glow on his fingers were a side effect of him losing his mind, but when John located it was blood, Brian understood that it was not just a figment of his imagination for a change.

‘Stop it, Brian, you’re bleeding,’ John said as he picked up Brian’s arm at the height of his elbow and pulled it away from the door he was trying to mutilate, which in turn only mutilated his own hands. ‘The only thing you’ll do is hurt yourself.’ Despite the fact that his arms looked like a battlefield, Brian found out that john had a surprisingly strong grip on him; no matter how he struggled, he could not shake off the grip John’s iron fingertips had on him.

‘Perhaps I _wanna_ hurt myself,’ Brian gritted out in frustration.

‘You don’t,’ John told him, before he corrected himself: ‘I mean, you might want to, but you won’t do it. We made a deal, you and me, remember?’

Of course Brian remembered the deal, the deal they had made when John had asked him to go outside with him. They had been sitting on the swings when John had pulled a handful of items he used to self-harm with out of the leg of his trousers and had suggested that he would throw them away and stop self-harming if Brian would promise him the same thing. Brian had agreed to this deal instantly and had consequently also never gone back to his self-mutilating habits, even though the last five days had made him want to hurt himself really, really badly. Knowing he had failed to keep Jimmy alive made him want to stick needles in his fingers, scratch open his arms, punch his firsts against the wall until they would start bleeding-

‘Brian?’

John’s voice called out to him, and Brian realised that he had not answered John yet. He had drifted off into his own world, his own guilt and sorrow, to think about how badly he had failed as a human being. His hand curled up into a fist which he involuntarily started beating it against the door again - something John seemed to notice more than he did himself.

‘Brian, stop that and answer me.’ John’s voice was louder and stricter than Brian had heard it being so far, but he could not bring himself to listen to his roommate. He needed to hurt himself, he deserved it, he needed to remind himself of how useless he was and all of that.

‘Brian, don’t-’

‘Shut up!’ Brian shouted, loudly enough to cut John off mid-sentence. ‘I made that promise _before_ I found out someone died because of me! Before I realised how much I deserve to hurt myself!’

John backed off, but only slightly. Brian had a feeling it was not because of his suddenly cruel words, but because John seemed to understand he needed space right now. There was silence between the pair of them for a moment, a moment which was eventually broken by John.

‘You don’t deserve to hurt yourself, Brian. You deserve to treat yourself so much better,’ John whispered. His voice was soft and soothing and Brian wanted to believe him, but he found himself being unable to. Everyone still spoke of him as a hero for having stepped up for Jimmy, but Brian felt like the opposite. He felt like a murderer, and nobody, not even John, could change his perception on himself in this particular situation.

‘I deserve to treat myself better?’ Brian asked calmly as he turned to John, a look of anger on his face by now; not so much towards John, but towards himself. ‘I deserve to treat myself better? What I deserve is to fucking _die_ for letting someone else die, that’s what I deserve! I deserve to be put in isolation or jail or death row or… or God knows what to do with someone useless like me! Goddamnit!’ he cursed as his fist crashed down on the door handle with a sickening sound. He buried his painful hand against his chest and flinched involuntarily. He wanted to prove he was strong, stronger than this at any rate, but he felt like his arm was on fire and could not help letting his back fall against the door he had given up on trying to open and letting his body slide down until he was sitting on the floor. And once he was sitting there, bare legs on the cold floor and shoulders pressed against the door, he could not keep himself together anymore. Hanging his head in an attempt to hide his face from the body who was still standing in front of him, Brian closed his eyes and let tears he had bottled up for much too long escape. He furiously hoped John would not notice, but he soon realised that it was stupid to even think about this; John was always aware of everything that was going on, and it only took him a few seconds to realise Brian was crying.

‘Oh, Brian…’

Through a haze of tears Brian saw how his roommate crouched down in front of him. Two hands reached out and slipped themselves around his torso, and the moment John closed his arms around him, Brian felt all resistance in his body weaken - resistance to tell John to leave him alone, resistance to the door he still wanted to break open, resistance to crying. All he could do the moment John took him into his arms was let go of himself and cry his heart out - which was something he would later realise was something he had not yet done since Jimmy’s death.

The event had numbed him, made him feel angry, helpless, like he was a terrible human being, but he had not yet given himself the time to let all of these emotions go in the form of crying. He had never managed to so far, and even if he would have wanted to, he knew he would have done all that was within his ability to oppress his tears. He didn’t want anyone to see him crying, and at Queen Mary’s, privacy did not seem to be a concept people were familiar with. Wherever one would go, wherever one would hide, others would always be just around the corner; it was as if there was not a single spot in this building or its premises where you could go without feeling like someone would be seeing you, overhearing you, going after you. For this exact reason, Brian had never allowed himself to cry over Jimmy’s death, out of fear that a nosy roommate or overconcerned staff member would meddle with him in his moment of temporarily weakness. No one was to see him in that state of being, no one apart from John. John was the exception to this general rule, as John always seemed to be the exception; the one Brian didn’t want to push away, but whom he longed to cling onto and have by his side. There was something about John; his quietness, his tranquillity, his social detachment yet capabilities of kindness, support, and empathy towards those he had singled out to grace with this rather unknown side of his personality.

And at this exact moment, Brian was as grateful as he ever could be about the fact that John had decided to take him under his wing; that he was here to wrap his arms around him, to hush him, to tell him it was alright, and most of all, to simply hold him. He had so long been in need of someone to show him support and affection, and to finally find it in John after his emotional outburst on an evening like this, lifted a weight off his shoulders he never could have imagined one single person to be able to remove. But this was not just any other person; this was John, and with John, things were always a little different compared to the rest of the people he knew.

That was why Brian did not protest when John enveloped his torso with his arms, restricted his hands from banging at the door, and held him tightly as Brian fell into helpless sobbing. He could not remember an instant in his life when he had been in need of someone like John to be at his side quite as much as right now. It faintly dawned on him that maybe, if he would have had someone like John at his side all through these last few years, he probably never would have fallen into a depression as deeply as the one he was suffering from right now, never would have been sent away to a psychiatric institution like the one he was finding himself in at the moment. The people around him - parents, friends, most of his previous therapists and psychiatrist - had all meant well, but they had never been with him at the moments he really had been needing them. They never seemed to feel him quite like John did; John, who at the present moment did not speak, did not wipe away his tears and told him to ‘man up’ as many others would have done in his place. He simply held him and let him cry his heart out, which Brian soon found out was exactly what he had been needing to do for a longer time than he had been willing to admit.

Brian did not know how much time had passed by the time his helpless crying finally had subsided to an erratic sobbing - nor was he willing to guess the probably rather embarrassing amount of minutes this must have taken. He carefully detached his hands from John’s grip, wiping away the tears from his eyes and cheeks while a single sob escaped his throat. He hardly dared to look up and meet John’s eyes, but he knew the situation more or less demanded him to; with him on his knees on the floor and John, one hand still on his shoulder, crouching before him, it was impossible to avoid his eyes, the hand lingering on his shoulder, the overall stability John’s mere presence seemed to emit.

When Brian at last gathered all of his courage and looked into John’s eyes, a strange sense of duality came over him. On the one side, he wished he could vanish into thin air so he never would have to face John, the one person in this place he aimed to establish himself as a stable and likeable personality to, again. On the other hand, however, he was relieved, happy even that this emotional outburst had been taking place between him and John instead of anyone else in this place. There was something about John that made him trust him; the sincere look in his eyes told Brian that he did not think it weird at all that he had just cried like a baby for God knew how long. The fact that John so far had never proved to be talkative to anyone save him when they were on their own (perhaps this was still an understatement; the fact that he never opened his mouth to anyone save him if he did not absolutely have to, more like), served to comfort Brian with the thought that John would not tell anyone of this particular nightly escapade.

Brian sought for something to say; an apology for having made a fool out of himself, for having dragged John out of his sleep and out of his bed at this point in time, or a word of thank for John having stayed with him. Unfortunately, nothing sensible popped up in his brain - and even if it would have, Brian was sure he would have been unable to utter it. He was still occasionally emitting sobs, and a thin, new line of tears was gracing the skin which he had just cleaned of tears a mere minute ago. Luckily for him, it was John who spoke first.

‘Come on,’ John encouraged him as he got up from his crouched position on the cold vinyl floor. We’re gonna go to the bathroom. Do something about those grazes,’ he explained. He reached his hand out to Brian to help him off the floor, but, soon realising that the contact between grazed skin and any kind of surface was a rather painful experience, he instead placed his hands under his armpits and carefully helping Brian off the floor. Now that he had gotten up, Brian decided that it was time to leave behind the awkward escape attempt he had been pursuing before John had come along, and with that, leave behind the tears he had shed at this place. With a rough gesture, he wiped the tears off his face with the back of his hand, before he followed his roommate towards the bathroom at the other side of the first floor of the building.

Brian found out that it was a surprisingly short walk when they reached their destination in little less than a minute. Now that there were no groups of people blocking the way, or people making them stop in the middle of the hallway to ask whether they had seen this or that person or whether they were having lasagne or macaroni for dinner that night, they could swiftly make their way to the bathroom they were aiming for. Brian wished it could always be like this; just John and him, having the entire place to themselves, without anyone else paying attention to them, just letting them be.

The light of the bathroom flickered on and off multiple time before it eventually emitted an artificial overhead light over the room they had just entered. Brian had to squint against the brightness that seemed to overpower him; it formed a huge contrast to the dimly lit hallways John and he had gotten used to during their stay at the door that separated the dorm rooms from the rest of the building. Still, they got used to it quickly enough, and John was the first to jump into action. Whereas Brian lingered at the door, John tore a handful of paper towels out of the towel dispenser above the endless row of sinks, after which he carefully opened the tap and let a small amount of water drip down on it.

‘As usual we don’t have anything else than water and paper to clean things up with,’ John said with a bit of a sigh. The remark seemed innocent enough to Brian at first, but he soon realised that John’s annoyance with having to rub the blood off his hands and cover the grazes up with nothing more than water and paper towels to help him out, probably came from the many times John had had a go at self-harming, and afterwards had had trouble cleaning up the mess. Brian recognised the problem himself, and the memories of past times, with shaving razors covered in blood and stains that would never leave his mother’s otherwise crisp white towels, made him feel dizzy.

‘Either way, if you’ll sit here, I’ll clean your hands,’ John instructed with a nod towards the sink. It seemed like a reasonable plan to Brian, especially now that the idea of blood covered razors and towels were making him feel queasy. He tiptoed over to the place where John was standing and carefully hoisted himself onto the sink, trying hard to avoid any contact between the greyish metal surface of the sink and his grazed palms. As soon as he had settled down, John picked up his hand - first the left one - and turned it around to turn the palm into his direction, and he slowly pressed the wet paper towels against the spot. Brian could not say it really hurt; it was an unpleasant feeling, surely, but it did not sting as badly as he had anticipated. Whether this was due to the fact that it was simply a bit of water pressed against his grazed palm, or because he was used to worse degrees of physical pain, was a question he dared not answer for himself.

‘It doesn’t seem that bad. It’s already stopped bleeding,’ John remarked when he started moving the piece of paper over the blood-covered surface of Brian’s hand. ‘It’ll be sensitive for a few days, but that should be all.’

‘Thank you,’ Brian whispered after John had shared his conclusion with him. He tried to offer the younger boy a smile, but the suddenly overly serious and even somewhat stern look he was met with when he faced John, prevented him from doing so - and, had this not been enough to make his smile withdraw, the words John spoke to him a second after would have done the job.

‘And now you’re gonna talk to me.’

For a moment, Brian considered protesting, or pretending like he had no idea what John was talking about, but he soon deemed it to be useless. Not only was he rather positive that John would not let him go before he had been told what he wanted to hear, but on top of that, Brian knew that it was time to speak up how the death of a fellow patient he felt responsible for affected him. He had been silent long enough; and if he had to open up his heart to anyone, who could possibly be better to play the role of listening to his tale than John?

Brian cleared his throat and looked away from John’s probing eyes before he spoke. ‘I can’t shake off the idea that it was my fault, John. That he died because I didn’t do more to save him.’ The subject needed not to be named or pointed out in any further way; John knew exactly what Brian was talking of, and his eyes never left Brian’s face when he replied to him, even not when Brian had long given up on looking back at him.

‘You are _not_ to blame, Brian. You are in no way to be held responsible for Jimmy committing suicide. You did not know he was so close to the edge of it, and even if you were aware of it, it’s still not your fault. You were the only one in this entire _Goddamn_ place,’ John cursed, which struck Brian as out of character purely or the fact that John so far had not seemed to be a big fan of using strong language that drew the attention to himself, ‘that tried to help him. You do realise that, don’t you?’

Brian remained quiet at first, but when John repeated his question, he realised that his roommate would not take silence for an answer. He answered the affirmative, but it sounded so bleak in his own ears that he did not believe himself, let alone that John would be convinced of him realising he was not to blame for Jimmy’s death.

John, who by now had finished wiping the blood from Brian’s left hand, moved on to the right hand. ‘You don’t believe me,’ he remarked between clenched teeth, a mild reproach which neither managed to make Brian look up at him nor to speak to him. Brian remained silent while John engaged in a few more fruitless attempts to make Brian understand that he was not to blame for Jimmy’s suicide, even though the both of them knew they were useless. The past days all everyone had been doing was trying to convince Brian that he was not guilty, that if anything he was the one who had meant more to Jimmy than anyone else around them, but it had been no use. No one seemed to get through to him - not Freddie’s sincerity or Roger’s optimism, Nolan’s mentorship or Sarah’s authority - and even John had so far been getting nowhere trying to talk to Brian. This time, however, it seemed to Brian that John was not going to let him go with a simple ‘you know I’m here when you need me’.  In fact, Brian was rather sure his roommate would not release him before he had heard him talk about the matter that had been on Brian’s mind endlessly lately.

‘Are you listening to me?’ John asked quietly, looking thoroughly at Brian while his roommate continued to avoid his gaze at all costs.

‘I can hear you,’ Brian mumbled eventually when the silence between the pair of them started to last uncomfortably long. ‘I just don’t see how Jimmy’s death was not my fault. I mean, I tried, but…’

Brian didn’t have to finish this sentence; John knew what he was getting at without having him say it out loud. Though everyone around him praised him for practically having been the only one to lend Jimmy a helping hand during the last days of his life, Brian himself only saw his efforts as useless because they had not saved Jimmy, and blamed himself for not having done more than he had - as if standing up for Jimmy on more accounts could have prevented the severely depressed boy from having taken his own life. By this logic of being responsible for Jimmy’s suicide by not having been able to prevent him from it, John as afraid that the entire institution was at fault for not having talked the idea of taking his own life out of Jimmy’s head.

And now that he was thinking about it, John found that there might be truth in what Brian was getting at. Ariel and Jasper had told his group time and time again that in a community like this, they were all responsible for the safety and well-being of each other. John had always seen it as not bullying each other, helping each other when necessary, and making sure quarrels were talked over before things got out of hand, but maybe Jasper and Ariel had been hinting at a more active attitude - a proactive attitude even, perhaps. Not just not bullying each other, but standing up for people when they were being bullied; not just helping each other when help was asked for, but when one suspected someone needed it; and not just talking quarrels over before they got out of hand, but talking over disagreements before they could turn into quarrels. And most of all - not just helping people when they were having a hard time, but informing others - friends, mentors, group therapists, and other authorities - when people were going through difficult times. After all, the more people who knew about someone’s unfortunate circumstances, the more people could take them into account, look after them, help them, make them feel like they mattered and were not alone.

And that, perhaps, could have saved Jimmy. One person standing up for him in a fight had obviously not been enough to prevent him from hanging himself; but a handful of people standing up for him, a dozen of people talking to him, and everyone around the place helping him by simply showing sympathy and kindness, might have made a huge difference for the life that once was. Might have made the difference between Jimmy stepping out of it, or deciding to hang on for another while.

Maybe Brian was right. Maybe all of them were guilty for not having stepped up for Jimmy - and John himself most of all. He had not been allowing himself to think about the matter too much, let alone mention it to anyone, but there was an instance that had taken place on the very day of Jimmy’s death - possibly a mere hour before it - that he could not let go of. An instance that would not leave his mind for more than five minutes in a row - and which buzzed around in his brain even more when he was in the presence of Brian as his roommate was mentally torturing himself over Jimmy’s suicide.

It might have seen like a trifling affair, and John was not even sure if Brian still remembered it, but he sure as hell did. After their group therapy session five days ago, where Jimmy had not been present, Brian had proposed visiting Jimmy to make sure he was doing alright. He, however, had shut this idea down by saying he did not know where Jimmy’s room was, and proposed to go outside and show Brian the premises of Queen Mary’s. Saying he did not know where Jimmy’s room was and that authorities were not allowed to tell him for reasons of privacy had not been a lie, but rather an excuse - and a lame one, for he knew he could have asked someone around the place who ought to know. The truth was that he had been tired, not in the mood to worry about people not showing up to group therapy sessions (for this was something that happened on a daily base for no other reason than people not feeling like engaging in social interaction), and most of all, that he had wanted to be alone with Brian, who was the first person he had met during his stay at Queen Mary’s so far that he felt could become a friend of his. The decision to brush Brian’s plans off and take him outside instead had been stupid, selfish, and most of all, it turned out to have been a decision that would haunt him until the end of his days for its consequences. It might have made the difference between still having Jimmy walk around this place, or having seen his body being carried out of the building in a body bag by the handful of police investigators who had been called into the place once his roommates and he had discovered Jimmy’s corpse hanging from the bathroom ceiling.

John closed his eyes and tried to wipe the image of the situation described above away from his mind, but doing this only left him with more intense questions and guilt about the subject he had been wanting to put out of Brian’s mind but which by now had settled into his own. If Brian was blaming himself for not having done enough to save Jimmy, then where did that leave him, consciously having made the decision not to go after Jimmy when he had been aware the boy had needed support more than ever?

After John had managed to put all of his thoughts in order - at least enough to be able to pick up the conversation again - he found that he had no idea where that they had last discussed. As Brian was still staring down at his knees and did not seem to be the one to initiate conversation again, John decided that he might as well inform Brian of the conclusion his mind had just gotten to.

‘Listen, Brian, it was my fault. It was all my fault,’ John whispered, so softly that it surprised him that Brian could hear him. He was sure Brian had heard exactly what he had told him, however; the look on his face was too quizzical and misunderstanding to be indicative of not having heard him. The frown on his face told John that Brian was not wondering what he had said, but what he meant with his unexpected words.

‘Why you?’ Brian asked him quietly. John found that the roles were reversed now; whereas Brian looked up at him, he was the one to now find interest in his shoes so he did not have to face his company as he talked. He picked up the piece of paper towel he noticed he had put down on the iron sink somewhere in the middle of the ramblings of his mind, and continued cleaning the grazes on Brian’s right hand.

‘Because you proposed to go check on Jimmy after group therapy, and I refused. I know, I didn’t know where his room was, but I could’ve asked,’ John said when he could sense Brian was about to complain about his line of reasoning. ‘Someone in this place must have known where Jimmy’s room was, and if we would have shared our concerns with Nolan or Jasper and Ariel, they would have helped us. The fact of the matter is that I wasn’t in the mood to go check on him, that I didn’t care enough, and that’s why Jimmy’s death now.’

Silence filled the room around them. Brian, who had been blaming himself endlessly for Jimmy’s passing but never had extended his possible guilt in the matter to anyone else, obviously needed a moment to come up with a reply to console John with.

‘You can’t blame yourself for that. He might have been hanging there for… for hours, for all we know,’ Brian brought up, but he sounded like he did not believe it himself - let alone that John would be convinced of his innocence by this possibility.

‘But what if he hadn’t?’ John asked.

‘You mustn’t reason like that,’ Brian tried to hush his roommate, but unfortunately for him, it turned out to have the opposite effect on John, who, the longer he thought about his own negligence towards Jimmy, felt more and more like he was the one to be blamed for the boy’s suicide. Having someone who had tried all he could to save Jimmy from suicide telling him he was not to blame while he had done nothing to prevent it, only made John feel worse about himself, and he could not oppress the desire to let Brian know this.

‘That’s how you reason, right? You blame yourself because you didn’t do more to save Jimmy, and that’s why he died,’ John summarised Brian’s thoughts about his own actions. ‘But guess what? You _tried_. You _tried_ all you could for him, you proved your worth. All I did was prove how fucking _useless_ I am by doing nothing as he lay dying!’

‘John…’

Only when Brian spoke his name did John realise he must have gradually raised his voice during his talk. Normally someone trying to quiet him down would have been enough to set him off and continue in an even harder tone, but this time it did not, and the sole reason for this was that it was Brian who had whispered his name. Anyone else calling out to him while he was uttering his thoughts would have made John continue firing them at said person even more than he had done before, but because it was Brian - the only one in this entire place, this entire _world_ , he would have gotten out of bed for in the middle of the night to comfort - he called himself to order and continued more softly, even though it was just for a little while.

‘I didn’t do anything to help him, and it haunts me to know that I could have prevented his suicide,’ John opened up to Brian, who looked at him thoroughly enough to discover his blood type. ‘All I had to step up and not look away for once in my Godforsaken life,’ he admonished himself.

‘John, you didn’t have to do…’ Brian tried to reason, but John would not have it; even though it was Brian who spoke to him, and the last thing he wanted to do was make Brian shut down again right now that he had finally opened up to him after five days of silence, he would not have anyone, including his friend, tell him he did not need to do anything for Jimmy, because both knew deep inside their hearts that everyone, including the pair of them, carried a responsibility for the safety of everyone at this place, and all had a duty to help Jimmy overcome his demons - both external and internal. Some people might have praised themselves merely for never having bullied Jimmy, but John knew better than to count himself among the saints for not having engaged in cruelty against their fellow patient. On the contrary, he felt like everyone who had not tried to help Jimmy should be seen as a sinner, and he himself was most to blame for purposely having refused to do anything.

‘I _did_ have to! I didn’t do _anything_ to help him!’ John protested just as loudly as he expected his voice had been before Brian had tried to calm him down. ‘I was in bed when you stood up for him. While Drew cut open your face and threatened to poke out your eyes. And what did I do? I could hardly get up and say a word when you returned!’

When John had finished his speech, he found that somewhere in the middle of it, he had dropped the piece of paper towel on the floor and was facing Brian by now, who at the same time looked back at him. The silence between the pair of them allowed John to calm himself down by counting to ten, and to focus on the person he had finally managed to look into the eyes. He was glad to find that Brian did not seem distraught by his sudden emotional outburst; perhaps he was surprised at the very most, but even if, he managed well to hide this feeling. All John could see in his eyes was understanding, sympathy and maybe even empathy, even though especially this latter sentiment was one he knew he was not worthy of. He did not deserve it, especially not at a moment like this from a person like Brian, but still he was happy that Brian and he could give each other sympathy and understanding at a time when they both most needed it.

Knowing he could tell Brian exactly what was on his mind, John took a deep breath and confided softly: ‘And the worst thing is that I _do_ care. I _do_ care about Jimmy having died, and I care about you almost having been sliced up by a maniac who belongs in prison rather than here! I care more than anyone would ever believe, but it just doesn’t come out anymore. It’s just…’ he paused for a moment to look for words that seemed so hard to find now that he was looking for a way to describe how he felt both empty and full of emotion on the inside. ‘I have feelings, somewhere deep inside, but I don’t act upon them anymore. I just sort of… pushed them away years ago, and now they just won’t come out anymore.’

‘I know,’ Brian whispered. ‘I know what it’s like. That’s the depression,’ he said, and though John knew what his roommate meant by saying this, he would not allow his state of mental health to be taken as an excuse for not having stepped up and done something to help the person who was no longer among them as an effect of others’ negligence.

‘It is, but depression not an excuse to turn my back on people and watch them die,’ John replied more bitterly than he had intended to do.

‘That’s not what you did, John. You can’t blame yourself for his death when you did not know he was on the verge of suicide,’ Brian told him, and though John - again - knew that he meant well, he could not help but snicker at this rather pathetic line of reasoning. It was the exact same reasoning Brian had been using all along to blame himself for Jimmy’s suicide, and now that he had adopted the same pattern, his roommate suddenly declared the whole way of thinking to be invalid.

‘Nice consistency in your reasoning there,’ John could not help but pointing out. ‘If you think you’re guilty for Jimmy’s death while you were the only one trying to help him, then surely you must think I should be hanged for my negligence, right?’ he called out to Brian, who looked slightly startled and very helpless now that John got back at him. The sparkle of unease - fear even, perhaps - visible in Brian’s eyes as he opened his mouth and closed it again right away when no sensible get-back seemed to dawn on him, was all John needed to see to cast his eyes down and apologise to the roommate who was the last person on earth he ever wished to either offend or upset.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that I… ’ John felt a slight blush creeping up his cheeks, and he crouched down to pick up the paper towel he had dropped to the floor moments ago as to prevent Brian from seeing his face. He knew it was a solution that could not last longer than mere seconds, but these were seconds he could very well use to calm himself down and come up with something to say. ‘It’s just that the whole matter of Jimmy’s death and you feeling so guilty about it while you shouldn’t is weighing down on me. I feel terrible for not having reached out while I could to help him. He was a good person, and he… he deserved a better fate than this one,’ John concluded, having to look away to pretend Brian from seeing either the redness of his cheeks or that which was starting to surround his eyes no that he was not sure if he could keep his tears to himself. He did not want to cry, and especially not in front of Brian - who still looked like he was a mere step away from a mental breakdown - but Brian seemed to be comforted by the idea that he was not the only one getting emotional over Jimmy’s fate.

‘I’m glad to hear that you care about Jimmy’s death. I was starting to feel like I’m the only one,’ Brian admitted. In any normal situation John would have told the person saying this that they were exaggerating, but in the case of Jimmy, it did not seem far from the truth. There must be people out there who cared, John was sure of it, but now that he was thinking about it he could not recall any instance of anyone publicly showing they mourned the loss of the boy. Brian feeling like he was the only one who had been upset by recent events was perhaps not that weird of a sentiment.

‘Of course you’re not the only one. We all care,’ John said, but when he heard how bleak this sounded to his own ear, he added a disclaimer to this statement in the form of ‘to some extend…’.

‘I don’t notice too much of it, not from the staff nor from the patients,’ Brian said, the look on his face turning gloomy whereas John had meant to comfort him with the idea that other people cared for Jimmy also, be it invisibly to their eyes. ‘There wasn’t even an official notice of his death. I haven’t seen anyone crying or even speaking about it with more emotion than they do when discussing the weather. No one set up a memorial or a condolence register for his family or… I don’t know how things work at places like this, I’ve only been here for one and a half week, but I would have expected _some_ form of grief, you know? People showing they care,’ Brian said, ending on a sentimental note with a pair of eyes shimmering with tears to match.

‘I know what you mean,’ John said, nodding slowly. ‘Showing emotion is a thing most people are bad at at this place, and that becomes this much more obvious whenever someone dies.’

The moment John uttered the word ‘whenever’, he knew it had been a bad choice of vocabulary, for it implied that ambulances rode onto the premises and that bodies were carried out of the building on a weekly base. However, before he got the chance to correct his use of language, Brian had already made it impossible to return from his faulty words.

‘Has it happened before? While you were in here?’ the boy asked, and John chewed on the inside of his cheek while he pondered about how he should answer this question. He did not want to disturb Brian even further by telling him of what other horrific events had passed at this place, but the truth was that he had witnessed, be it directly or indirectly, the death of three other people at this place. For a moment he considered playing down these facts, but Brian looked at him with such big inquisitive eyes, that he could do no one else but tell him the unveiled truth.

‘It happened thrice while I was in here,’ John said at last, which he himself considered to be both to the point yet evasive as to what had caused the death of the three unfortunate patients of Queen Mary’s. However, he should have known that Brian would inquire after these facts the moment John had told him the number of casualties from the institution, which indeed his roommate did.

‘What happened to them?’ Brian asked carefully; he sounded as if he did not really want to know whatever gruesome events had ended their lives, but also could not carry on without possessing said knowledge.

‘Well, it’s… they’re not very… nice stories, as to say so,’ John tried in an attempt to make Brian withdraw his request of being told what had been going down, but when Brian did not do as much as blink at these words, John decided he might as well throw it all out and get it over with. ‘One person died from a stab wound following a quarrel that had gotten out of hand, someone from a heroin overdose, and one from an eating disorder.’

While he summed up the causes of death, John found that a new element had been added to the pattern he had discovered a while ago - not a universal pattern that would have spoken to all who would have heard the enumeration, but one that he knew for a fact Brian should be able to sense just as well as he did. The fighting and the knife, the heroin, and the eating disorder; it all tied in a lot with both recent and ongoing affairs, and John swore he could practically see Brian’s stomach churn and his face pale when the boy noticed the same pattern he had discovered months ago, but which had been strengthened by the addition of the knife.

‘Those sound oddly familiar, the fight, and the knife…’ Brian remarked softly. Then, even quieter than before, he added: ‘And those could have been Freddie and Roger.’

‘I know,’ John gritted through clenched teeth as he massaged his forehead that suddenly seemed to sting from the inside out. ‘The thought of that has been keeping me busy as well. Do you remember when Roger slipped?’

‘How could I forget that?’ Brian answered as if the events were replaying themselves right in front of his eyes at that moment.

‘Fair enough,’ John admitted, realising it had been a stupid, obvious question to ask to someone who had obviously been shocked and continued to worry about Roger’s drug addiction to this day. ‘Either way, I might have seemed calm, but I was dying on the inside when Freddie brought him into our room that evening.’

‘I wouldn’t have guessed so judging by how calm you looked,’ Brian said with a small smile that soon faded from his face when John started explaining his behaviour.

‘That was all façade. Look, the reason why I’m so distant towards practically everyone is not just because I don’t care, but because I don’t dare attach myself to them and then lose them again. It might seem like I don’t care, about Freddie and Roger for example, but I watch their every step, make sure they go to all their therapy sessions, stay up at night to make sure they’re still alive… This sounds creepy,’ John said, face twisting into a grimace when he realised that what he was saying did not so much come over as being caring but being stalkerish towards his roommates. Luckily for him, Brian did not seem to see too much harm in it.

‘Creepy but sweet,’ Brian shrugged, which involuntarily made John blush and burn with desire to change the topic back to the one he intended to speak about.

‘What I’m trying to say… People often do care. They’re just bad at showing it. I’m a living example of it,’ John said with a bit of a chuckle, before he turned to Brian and added in a much more serious voice: ‘But you know I care, right?’

Brian needed not even a second to reply to him ‘I know you do. And you’re right; people probably do care about Jimmy, but they just don’t know how to show it or what to do with their feelings.’

‘We’re all here for a reason, after all,’ John said with a bit of a smile, after which he wiped the last smudge of blood from Brian’s palm. For a moment it seemed like silence was going to fill the space between them - a silence John for one would not have objected to, given that intense social interaction, even when it was with someone whose presence he appreciated, was taking its toll on him at this point of time. However, Brian broke the silence, and the moment his soft voice called out for him, John no longer minded, and was all too happy to reply to him.

‘But just one thing, if you don’t mind.’

‘Go ahead,’ John encouraged Brian, who somewhat awkwardly chewed on the inside of his lip before he spoke his mind.

‘You’re not distant to me.’

That was a spot-on remark, and it was one John had sensed he was going to receive from Brian sooner or later. The boy was sweet, kind, supportive, all he could possibly wish for in a friend, and still he did not seem to understand why people enjoyed his company. John had known that sooner or later Brian was going to ask him why he had picked him, out of all people at Queen Mary’s, to be at a friendly base while practically ignoring the rest of the population. It was just that he hadn’t expected him to ask it right now, in an abandoned bathroom in the middle of the night, and needed to come up with an answer that was both sufficient and true on the fly. The on the fly-part did not turn out to be so much of a problem; giving an answer that would suffice was something his tired mind did not seem to be capable of doing at the moment, though.

‘I intended to be distant to you, but I couldn’t,’ John admitted. ‘You… I don’t know. Seemed worth taking the risk, I guess,’ he ended up saying, which was a stripped-down version of the truth but which sure was the core of the reason why he had decided to open up to Brian. Because Brian had been the only person he had met so far who seemed to have been worth opening up to - and so far John had not regretted his decision.

Luckily for him, this was al explanation Brian needed from him; and even if he needed more, he was too busy hiding the blush on his face to ask any more questions, which in turn gave John the perfect opportunity to call it a night, both literally and figuratively.

‘Speaking of risks… We should go back to our room before the nightguard catches us,’ John told his roommate while crouching down to throw the paper towel into the bin beneath the sink, trying to look away from the blood-covered towel hanging out of it which reminded him of his former days.

‘There’s a nightguard?’ Brian asked quizzically.

‘Haven’t you heard him? They send someone out on patrol a few times each nights to make sure people don’t run around the place. That’s why I took you to the bathroom - if they’d find us, we’d have an excuse as to why we were out of bed,’ John told him.

‘Smart,’ Brian praised him.

‘You learn some little tips and tricks when you’re here for a while,’ John answered, moving towards the door and opening it as an unspoken announcement that it was time they’d go back to their dorm room and back to sleep - as far as one could speak of ‘sleeping’ on a night like this.

Brian jumped off the iron sink he had been sitting on during their entire nightly discussion, and John gallantly let him pass through the door before he followed him into the quiet, darkened hallway of the institution. As if by quiet agreement they did not speak, and tiptoed over to their room as to avoid being overheard by a nightguard strolling around the place. Somewhere in the back of his mind John knew it was rather useless; if no one had come to check on them while Brian had been pounding on the main door and sobbing his heart out the minute he had taken him into his arm, then surely no single person would be attracted by the sound of them quietly shuffling towards their room.

Only when the door of room 41 had been closed and locked behind them did John and Brian dare to speak again, be it very quietly; the last thing they wanted to do of course was wake up their roommates, who were lying huddled together on Freddie’s side of the two beds they had placed against each other for the night. Freddie’s thin arms were wrapped around Roger’s bare torso, and John had to oppress the tendency to cover their slim figures with the duvet that was folded just above their waists.

Given that they were already dressed in their pyjamas - that was, a loose t-shirt for the night - and had brushed their teeth before their first attempt of going to sleep, there was nothing left for the pair of them to do apart from lying themselves down in their beds again. It felt weird to slip under their covers again and say goodnight from out of nowhere, or at least it did so to Brian, who, after just having spent a pretty intense night in terms of emotions, felt like he had to say something to John before they would close their eyes and not see or speak to each other until dawn. The problem was that he had no idea what he should say; whether he should thank him for having stayed at his side for the evening, whether he should comfort him that Freddie and Roger were doing just fine (now knowing that their passing through was a great concern of John), or whether he should once again let him know that Jimmy’s death was not to be blamed on him, which after all had been the main topic of the night.

In the end, however, Brian did not share any of these thoughts and prayers with John, but instead asked a question that had been on his mind at irregular intervals; a question he never really had had the question to ask John, given that he had never felt like it was the right time to do so. He doubted if tonight would do, or if he should save his question for a later moment, but he figured that after all they had discussed over the past half hour (how much could happen in so little time!), this question could be thrown on top of the heap of thoughts, questions, and concerns they had been building.

‘John?’ Brian whispered just when John had laid down on his bed and started to rearrange his pillows. The boy looked into his direction and gave him a green light to speak up with a nod of his head in an attempt to stay as quiet as possible.

‘How long have you been here, if I may ask?’

‘Well, that’s a good question…’ John said, resting his head on his hands on top of his pillow as he thought it over for a moment. ‘I don’t really recall. Twenty months or so?’ he said as he turned his face to Brian, who was lying at the very edge of his bed with his face in John’s direction to drink in as much of his roommate as possible before the other boy would inevitably shut the small nightlight above his head and immerse the pair of them in darkness. ‘Yeah, twenty months or so it must’ve been, maybe a little more. It’s not that easy getting rid of me, as you can see,’ he chuckled.

Brian joined him in this, but his heart wasn’t in it; twenty months was a long time, especially when one had to spend it in a place like this. He for one could not imagine surviving more than three months at Queen Mary’s before losing his mind, and that was a very bright estimation. He wondered how John had dragged himself through all this time, but even more than that, he wondered why he had been in need to stay here for such a long time. Nolan had told him most people did not need to stay longer than six months, perhaps a year, and that only severe cases would be detained for longer - either to be dismissed after two years, or to be sent away to a long stay clinic.

Twenty months, or a little more perhaps as John had put it, was pretty close to two years. What was wrong with John to need to be detained at this place for so long? Sure, he was depressed, rather antisocial, and - quite frankly - Brian could not see him function in society in the state he was in right now. But was his condition really critical enough to lock him up in a psychiatric institution for one and a half, up to two years? And what would happen to him if he would not soon be qualified to leave this place? What was up with John that Brian could only guess at?

Brian was relieved when John shut the light and bade him goodnight the moment these thoughts started assaulting his mind like a whirlwind, so that his friend and simultaneous object of wonder did not have to see the concern for him on Brian’s face now that the darkness surrounded them.

 


	8. Part Eight

The pen in Brian’s hand had been hovering over the paper for so long that he felt the thumb- and index finger between which he was holding the item were starting to twitch slightly. He rolled the ballpoint pen around between his fingers, stretched his arm as far as the chord that tied the pen to the table would allow - security measures, as always - but he knew that nothing else apart from putting the pen to paper would save him from the cramp in his fingers.

Doing this, however, seemed to be the one thing Brian was incapable of doing. He had been standing bend over the crisp white pages with the writing tool in hands for what must have been at least five minutes, thinking of all possible messages to leave, and yet he had not gotten himself around to actually lowering the pen to the surface and writing down what he wanted to say. Perhaps he was so hesitant because he was the first one to write in the register, and did not want to taint its smooth pages with his awkward words, or make himself ridiculous in front of all who would come in after him and write down their last wishes to the deceased. That was, if anyone was going to show up here; the paper on the door of the canteen and on the door of this previously unused room both said that the condolence room would be open all day starting at eight that morning. The fact that it was one o’clock right now and Brian was the first person to write in the book that had been laid out to write down last messages for Jimmy and condolences to his family, deprived Brian of all hope that more than one, perhaps two pages of the book were going to be filled with words of kindness.

It was sad, really, really sad, that no one seemed to be taking the time or effort to sign the register. It was literally the only sign of empathy that had been shown from the institution so far. It seemed as if the management seemed to want to try and sweep Jimmy’s suicide under the carpet as fast as they could; in the nine days that had passed since his roommates and he had found Jimmy’s lifeless body hanging from the bathroom ceiling, nothing had been done in memoriam of the boy, to help people who suffered from his loss or were inclined to follow his example, or in any way talk about the topic of suicide in any way. From the moment Jimmy’s body had been carried out of the building by a team of police investigators who had been reluctantly admitted by the staff to examine the place, no sign of the existence of the boy had been found around the place, safe for mourning card on the bulletin-board in the canteen which his family must have sent over. The black card announcing the death and funeral of Jimmy - whose full name turned out to be the rather officious sounding James Joseph Abraham, which Brian could hardly find to be a fitting name for an adolescent - had been pitched to the pin board, but Brian, fearing that it soon would be covered in pushpin punctures and pen markers, had taken the card away the moment it was starting to show the first signs of deterioration every paper on the bulletin board seemed to have to undergo at this Godawful place, to save it from being attacked more than it already had been. The pitch black card was now lying in the lower drawer of his nightstand, and had been the only thing that had reminded him of the existence of someone who would never be here again, until this condolence register had popped up from out of the blue after more than a week of Jimmy’s death.

The most literal manifestation of ‘better late than never’ Brian had encountered in his life so far.

Still, he would not complain of the tardiness of opening up this empty room and placing a desk, a chair, and an empty sketchbook inside of it. He was happy that there was something, just anything, to remember Jimmy and to recognise and honour his life - it was just as shame that Brian had no idea how he was supposed to do this. The cramp in his fingers, still hovering above the paper, became nearly unbearable after all these minute, and Brian forced himself to put himself to action and put pen to paper.

_Dear Jimmy,_

As soon as Brian had scribbled down these two words, he was busy scratching them away again, suddenly unsure who exactly he had to address this book to. Was the register meant to write down last messages to Jimmy in, or was one meant to address his family and send them one’s condolences?

In a quest for an answer to this question, Brian folded the page he was currently writing on over to see if there was any sort of inscription on the index page, but there turned out to be none. He then attempted to lift up the book in the hopes that maybe the cover contained some indication as to for whom the book was, but the book seemed stuck to the table, and Brian sighed inwardly. After having been around this place for two weeks, he should have known better than to expect items not either being taped to their surface or being restrained by a metal cable to prevent theft, such as the pen he was holding onto.

Giving up on his attempt to find out who he had to address, he simply tried to use logic. He had never attended many funerals; for the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life his parents were convinced he was too young to see something like that, and the last funeral he had been allowed to attend - before his parents prevented him from going because they were afraid that seeing someone’s burial or cremation would inspire him to follow their example in the depth of his depression - had been many years ago. He did not remember any of the details, hardly even the name of the neighbour whose funeral they had attended, let alone what he had written down or to whom he had written in the condolence book. The pages before him were blank, and he had no one around to ask for advice, so Brian figured that he would just have to do whatever felt good - which he found, in this case, would be to write directly to Jimmy instead of to his family. Granted, he had not known Jimmy well, but as he had never even seen any of his family members, it seemed more natural to Brian to address his fellow patient.

_~~Dear Jimmy,~~ _

_Dear Jimmy,_

_What happened to you never should have happened_

This sentence was crossed off just as quickly as the previous one has been. Of course nothing like this should have happened, but what use was saying that to Jimmy and his grieving family?

_I did not know you for a very long time, but the time I did spend with you is one I will never forget_

This statement made Brian doubt just as much as the previous ones had done. He would never forget Jimmy, but was that because of his tragical suicide, or because of who he really had been as a person? During the few short moments Brian had met him in the canteen and during group therapy he had seemed a kind personality with a warm heart, and though Brian did not doubt that he would have liked him even better if he had got to spend more time with the boy, he felt as if it was hypocrite to make bold statements about ‘never forgetting’ someone you’d only known for days. Such things should be reserved to the family, not a fellow patient at the psychiatric ward he had met a few days prior to his death.

_I am heartbroken by your loss. I still cannot conceive that you are not here anymore, and I wish I could have been_

A line was drawn through this sentence, as Brian felt that it was selfish to talk of what effect Jimmy’s death had on him when there were people who had been much closer to him, and Brian pondered about what to write instead. He had never been very good at comforting people in difficult times, and this current situation was really putting him to the test. He wanted to write something meaningful, but not oversentimental; he wanted to write something personal, but did not want to offend the family and all who were going to lay eyes on the words he was about to write down. Just the idea that God knew how many people would see his message over the course of the upcoming years - heartbroken friends, inconsolable parents, siblings who would never get used to the empty seat at the kitchen table - made Brian freeze to the core of his being, incapable of moving even a finger. It was as if an enormous rock had been placed on his shoulders and pressed down on Brian as he crumbled beneath its weight. He needed to come up with something better, something sensible, something that would not sadden, anger, or make people many miles away from here think of what on earth had been going on in his mind while he had left this message in the condolence book. His fingers felt clam and sweaty around the pen, and Brian bit down his bottom lip while he scribbled down half a sentence.

_Your loss has come as_

Well, as what exactly? As a great shock? As a lightning bolt in clear sky? As a declaration of war by a national ally? What on earth was he even doing, and where the hell did he want to go to with this mediocre opening sentence to a last message?

Just as Brian felt like throwing the pen down and walk out in frustration, a voice behind him distracted him from all that had been on his mind.

‘Need any typex?’

‘God!’ Brian gasped in utter surprise, and he swiftly threw his body around to see who had awoken him from his daydreams - or day nightmares, rather. The last thing he could use now was someone to stand behind him and impatiently wait for him to finish his writing, or for someone to say their eyes on all the sentences he had composed and then sloppily erased again. However, the moment he had turned around to look at whoever had walked in on him, he knew he did not have to worry about impatient fellow patients or people laughing at his attempt to write something to Jimmy and his family; he had way greater affairs to worry himself about when he found himself standing face to face with John.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,’ John said with a soft apologetic smile on his face which, although to was obviously meant to comfort Brian, it only made him blush even heavier than he would have done if he would have stood looking in anyone else’s eyes but John’s. He could not put his finger on what it was about John that made him feel both safe as he had ever been and insecure to the bone - especially not after last night, when his nightly conversation with John had raised just as many questions about his friend as it had answered. All he knew that John was here, that he had walked in on him breaking his head over what to write in the Godforsaken condolence book, and that he had to react to John’s sudden appearance as soon as possible if he did not want to look like a drooling gorilla to his roommate.

‘It’s okay. You didn’t, eh, scare me if that’s what you were afraid of,’ Brian managed to blurt out, feeling his cheeks starting to flush and his heart beating out of control. He would like to say that it was a result of John having startled him by suddenly popping up behind him, but in all honesty, Brian was afraid it was not John’s _unexpected_ appearance but just John’s appearance _in general_. Whatever it was about John and the way he talked to him as if he was the only one in the world he voluntarily wanted to converse with him, listened to him as if he was the only one he’d ever met worth listening to, treated him like he did not treat anyone else at this place, it had Brian puzzled.

‘Sure about that?’ John asked him - not sarcastically, but as if he was genuinely afraid he had given Brian quite a start - which he had, but Brian would rather jump off a cliff than admit this to the person he tried so hard not to look like a complete fool to.

‘No, no, I’m fine,’ Brian said, which he soon afterwards realised was not even a valid answer to John’s question. Bringing a hand up to his cheek to feel if they had turned red - and which, judging by the warmth nearly radiating from his skin, it had - Brian tried to change the topic by telling John as casually as possible: ‘If you’d have any typex, I’d be much obliged.’

‘I’m afraid it was more of an ice breaker than an actual offer. Typex is against the rules,’ John apologised, but Brian did not mind; all he cared about was that they were no longer talking about him and his awkwardness, and he hoped his cheeks could now be given a chance to return to their normal colour as they talked of the ban on typex and other unfortunate rules and regulations of Queen Mary’s.

‘I wonder why that still surprises me,’ Brian reacted to John in a voice that sounded much calmer than how he felt inside. ‘What happened?’

‘Someone drank half a bottle in an attempt to be admitted into hospital and flee from this place,’ John answered. ‘I’d like to say that that’s a level of desperation I have not gotten to yet, but I’m afraid I can’t even say that anymore after seeing God knows how much bullshit here.’

Brian chuckled as he heard this, but fearing that his chuckle sounded more like an awkward schoolgirl giggle, he bit down his bottom lip to restrain himself from producing any further sound. However, the sudden halt he had put to his chuckling left a somewhat unexpected silence hanging in the air between the two of them, and Brian was all too glad that John was the one to introduce a new topic, for he was sure he would have picked something insanely stupid if he had been the one to have come up with something himself.

‘So you’d found your way to the condolence book?’ John asked.

‘Yes, yes, I did,’ Brian said, suddenly remembering where they were and what he was in this claustrophobically small room for again. ‘I just saw this morning that there was one. I wasn’t expecting it to be honest. You know, there hasn’t really been anything to remember Jimmy so far,’ Brian said. ‘I mean, he wasn’t mentioned during the morning announcements, and we haven’t discussed it during therapy or anything... But maybe he was mentioned at church service. I didn’t go, I’m not religious - did you… you go perhaps?’ Brian blurted out, feeling his cheeks starting to heat up again as he asked the question that he already knew the answer to. John did not go anywhere he did not absolutely have to go to, so the voluntary church meeting at nine o’clock each Sunday morning was definitely excluded as an option to John.

Luckily for Brian, John did not think of it as a stupid question; and even if he did, he did not let it show. ‘No, I’m not really religious either. And I was just thinking the same; no attention has been paid to Jimmy’s suicide at all. I would expect a place like this, where so many people are at a high risk for suicide, to jump in on the topic, certainly now that it is so relevant.’

Brian nodded fervently in agreement, a bit more confident about his speech now that he knew that John and he were on the same page about the topic. ‘Staff is probably afraid that talking of it will trigger people to, you know, follow Jimmy’s road, but ignoring it as if nothing ever happened gives people the idea that no one would even care if they would die. It’s not right,’ he said, to which, in turn, John nodded at him.

‘Exactly. That’s why I set up this room. I thought it was about time-’

‘Wait, what?’ Brian interrupted John just before his roommate could properly finish his sentence. ‘You set this all up?’

‘I did. Well, all of it… It’s not really more than a table, an empty book, and a pen,’ John said with a healthy amount of self-mockery as he looked around the small room they were finding themselves in at the moment. ‘It’s not very spectacular, but I figured it’s the idea that counts, right?’

Brian nodded at his friend at commando rather than because he truly was listening to whatever it was that John was talking about. He had in absolutely no doubt that whatever John said was interesting, but he had lost track of the conversation the moment John had told him that he had been the thriving force behind the condolence room he had stepped into ten minutes ago. After having found so little interest or even acknowledgement from the general population of Queen Mary’s about Jimmy’s death, Brian had started to assume he was the only one who cared. The popping up of this room had therefore come to him as a pleasant surprise - a surprise that had got even more pleasant the second John has revealed it had been his initiative. John would have been the last person Brian would have suspected of pulling this place together; not because he thought John too cold-hearted to care about the people around him - their midnight conversation of the night before had proved this idea about John wrong, if Brian’s previous occasions between just the two of them had not managed to discard the image of John as disengaged - but because John did not usually show communal spirit of any kind. His roommate preferred staying in their dorm room, and preferably in his own bed, as much as he could; Brian therefore never would have pictured John rushing around the place arranging an empty room with the proper tools for condolence opportunities. To find out that he had, in fact, done this, only made John grow in his esteem.

‘I knew interest would probably be limited,’ John said with a nod towards the practically empty book on the table next to them, ‘but I felt that it was right to have the opportunity for those who wanted to pay their last respects to Jimmy. Such as you,’ John added softly, and when their eyes met, Brian could tell that John had not set up this room for those who wanted to pay their last respects, as he had just said so prettily; he had set it up for Brian in the first place. Neither of them admitted this knowledge, but the look that passed between the both of them was enough to ensure that both of them knew.

‘Thank you. That means a lot to me,’ Brian managed to produce in a voice that was hardly any louder than a whisper. It felt as if something or someone was restraining his throat, making him unable to bring out more than just a few words for the time being. It was as if he was paralysed on the inside, and he could come up with no other reason than John’s treatment of him to be the cause of it. The kindness John was showing him, both in the little and the big things, in the middle of publicity and in private, in daytime and in night-time, was a force Brian had missed for so long; that was, if he had ever experienced it at all. Surely, his parents had always done their best to protect him and to comfort him, his friends had been there for them when he needed them, but he could not remember anyone ever having stood by his side quite as much as John did, and John probably didn’t even realise how much it meant to Brian to have met someone who was so much capable of reading his mind, knowing what he needed and when he needed it, as much as his newest friend did.

They stood looking at each other in silence for another moment, neither of them capable of breaking away for a handful of seconds, until John eventually turned his eyes to the pages of the book next to Brian, and suddenly seemed to remember that Brian had been in the middle of a sentence when he had come in and interrupted him in his work.

‘Don’t you want to finish your message?’

Brian looked at him a bit puzzled, and it was only when John gave a nod towards the open book on the table next to him that he remembered what he had been doing in this room before his roommate had made his appearance.

‘Oh, no, I don’t think so,’ Brian said, but as he heard how terribly rude this sounded to his own ears (and, worse than that, when John turned to look at him with somewhat of a questioning expression on his face), he added softly: ‘I wish I could, but I don’t know what to say. What do you say when someone is bullied into suicide?’ he concluded his sentence even softer than how he had started it.

‘That’s… I think that’s the circumstances in this place lately have shown us that no one really has an answer to this question,’ John said intelligently, but he seemed to hesitate with every word he spoke, as if he had no idea where the sentence he was speaking was going to bring him.

Silence between the pair of them again, before John asked: ‘can I see what you’ve written so far? Only the last sentence, I mean. I won’t look at what you’ve crossed off.’

Brian nodded thankfully to grant John’s request once his friend had added this clause to it. He was not exactly proud of both his failed attempt to write a last message to Jimmy, and of the way he had crossed off his mistakes. It felt wrong to make such a mess out of a solemn setting like this, but letting those unfinished, embarrassing sentences just stand there for everyone to read, did not seem like a good solution to the problem either to Brian. If only typex _had_ been legal at this place…

Brian looked away when he saw John taking a step forwards and bend himself over the book as to be better able to see what his roommate had written down before he had walked in on him. John didn’t say anything for a time much longer than Brian knew he would need to read the seven lousy words he had so far managed to put down. He nervously bit down his lip; with every second that passed during which John did not respond and instead continued looking at the page that bore witness of his incompetence in writing solemn messages, the urge to say something to acknowledge his own stupidity grew within Brian, until he could no longer hold it in.

‘Just to have you know, I know it’s stupid,’ Brian said, but John did not seem to agree. He at any rate did not acknowledge it; he hardly seemed to acknowledge that Brian had spoken to him at all, in fact, for he did not look into his direction or even say a word at first. Just when Brian started wondering if John had been listening to him or if he had even heard him, John eventually spoke.

‘It’s not stupid. It just needs a proper conclusion of the sentence,’ John said, obviously pondering deeply on either what this conclusion should look like, or on Brian’s inability to form a proper sentence when the situation asked for it. Although Brian knew John was not the kind of person to hold his momentary lack of creativity against him, he was still inclined to go for this second option.

And next to that, all the sentence needed was a conclusion? The seven words he had penned down as they were at the moment were not even worth being called a sentence, let alone a worthy farewell-message. The problem was just that Brian had no idea how to make anything out of it, and chances that he was going to come up with something in the presence of another person - especially when this other person was John - seemed impossibly slim to himself.

‘Mind if I try and make something out of it?’

‘Please,’ Brian invited him in a voice that was not just relieved, but which bordered on desperation, very much willing to get rid of the evidence that he had written such a half-assed, unfinished message. ‘Go ahead.’

John did not need to be told twice; he was quick to pick up the pen, and, after having frowned at the half-sentence before him on the otherwise nearly blank page, he started scribbling. Brian did not mean to look over his shoulder while his roommate was busy figuring out what to write, but being literally almost a head taller than him, he could not help sneaking a look into the direction of the book and overlooking whatever it was that John was coming up with to add to the beginning he had provided for him to work from.

_Dear Jimmy,_

_Your loss has come as a sudden shock to all of us, but the real pain of missing a great soul like you will dawn on us as the years without you will go by. May what has been done to you never be repeated, and may your kindness and courage live on in all people you’ve inspired during your life. You will be in our hearts._

_Brian and John_

‘Shall I read it out to you or have you already seen it?’ John asked once he put down the pen, making Brian blush deeply. He thought he had been going about this rather secretly and smoothly, but it did not seem like he could keep anything from John - as usually seemed to be the case.

‘Sorry,’ Brian mumbled half-ashamedly.

‘Oh, no, that wasn’t supposed to be admonitory,’ John told him instantly. ‘I genuinely wanted to know if you’d been able to see what I wrote down or not. My voice has the tendency to sound sarcastic in the worst moments, if not at all moments.’

Brian felt relieved to hear this, but still could not completely shake off the feeling that he had been looking over John’s shoulder without his permission. However, as John seemed to have moved on from this piece of information and currently looked at him questioningly, Brian decided to move along with him.

‘Yes, I’ve seen it. I think it’s very good,’ Brian nodded, not taking his eyes off of the passage John had produced. It was a lot better than anything he ever could have come up with; it had the right amount of compassion, meaning, and kindness, without being selfish or inappropriately emotional for their relation to Jimmy. Shortly he thought that it was surprising that someone as quiet and unwilling to talk most of the time could be so eloquent and knew exactly what to write to the family of a deceased person, but he soon pushed this idea out of his head. John was quiet to the general public, but over the course of the last few days, he had shown exactly how talkative he could be if he chose to be so. Or perhaps talkative wasn’t the right word, for this implied that he could talk of small, everyday business, little affairs that one would talk of with co-workers during a coffee break - which was something he knew by now was something John did not do. He preferred silence over talking if there was nothing useful to say, but when the situation demanded him to be sociable or comforting, he knew exactly what to say and do.

‘Shall we do it like this? Or would you rather not have your name beneath this paragraph?’

‘No, I’d like to have it there. If you don’t mind, of course,’ Brian was quick to add. ‘You wrote this after all. It’s your legacy way more than that it’s mine,’ he said, a sudden wave of guilt washing over him if he thought of the idea of taking credit of what John had come up with.

John, however, seemed to have no trouble with that. ‘Of course I don’t mind. I wouldn’t have put your name there if I minded.’

Brian, once again feeling stupid when he realised he had asked a silly question, spoke what was on his mind. ‘But I don’t want to take credit of something you wrote, if you know what I mean.’

‘You don’t have to. You co-wrote it, after all,’ John said, even though the both of them knew perfectly well that the five words Brian had put in could hardly be called co-writing. Still, John was quick to put in a second argument to prevent Brian from being able to complain. ‘And besides, I like having your name there. You inspired me to pitch up all this in the first place.’

Brian had little to say to that, and decided that it was probably better to flash his friend a smile in gratefulness than to embarrass himself again by saying something that would undoubtedly turn out to be stupid. John rearranged the pen and the notebook on the table before turning back to him.

‘Wanna go outside for a bit? When I looked through the window this morning the weather looked pretty okay,’ John said casually, but Brian was almost positive he could detect a hint of genuine hope in his friend’s voice. And who would he be to turn down an offer to be alone with John, away from whatever madness was about to go down now that most people had time off between group therapy and lunch?

‘Sure. What time is it?’ Brian replied as he automatically turned to look at the place where his watch used to be - his watch, which was one of the many items that had been confiscated upon his arrival at Queen Mary’s.

‘Something past ten. We should be having plenty of time before lunch,’ John reasoned, and when Brian nodded in approval, they made their way out of the memorial room for other people - if there were any - to fill up the book with last messages, and walked towards the main hallway.

# # #

‘It surprises me there aren’t more people outside,’ Brian remarked as he peered around the practically empty gardens of Queen Mary’s. He knew that it was only March, but the weather was indeed, as John had told him, remarkably fine. There was hardly any breeze, no rain, and the sun was even shining mildly through a tight web of clouds. Still, the swings were freely available to them, there was no one sitting on the wooden benches that had been put in several places, and the table tennis tables were also not being used by anyone - although Brian had to admit that he had no idea where one could gather the proper requirements for a game of table tennis, if this was available at all. Probably it had been stolen by some patient, or had been confiscated by the staff after an attempt at suicide by swallowing a tennis ball or something the like.

‘I mean, it’s probably logical. Most depressed people don’t wanna go outside for the world,’ John remarked, placing his feet against the ground and lightly kicking off the swing into a rocking motion.

‘Yet we’re here,’ Brian said, even though he immediately knew it to be a stupid comment. Still, John knew well enough how to jump into it.

‘Depressed or not, going outside to be alone is a better alternative than staying in with two hundred and God knows how many people.’ Then, after a few seconds, he added: ‘I don’t remember how I used to do that.’

‘Do what?’ Brian asked timidly, not sure what he referred to.

‘Being around so many people. I mean, I was never fond of crowds, but I could stand them. People at high school, in stores, on the subway… Right now I think I would either hurt someone else or myself if I was faced with such a situation.’

John’s sentence had started out sounding rather recognisable to Brian, who himself also did not like finding himself in the middle of a multitude of people. He never had enjoyed crowded places, never would, and mainly in his current mental state he would do all that was within his power to get away from such a situation as soon as possible. However, hearing John saying so bluntly - yet almost admirably frankly - that he would ether harm others or himself if he would be in a situation the like, made Brian shiver inside, especially since he feared that his friend would take it out on himself rather than on anyone else. John did not strike Brian as aggressive, or even capable of aggression, except for towards himself. It was, after all, anger towards oneself, anger or hopelessness, a sense of utter loss of control, that had driven Brian himself towards self-harm, and he had a feeling that these exact same emotions had led to the same result in John.

Brian opened his mouth to say something on the topic, ask his friend if he was doing okay these last few days, but he was silenced by himself when he discovered that he did not know how to address it. He had never been good at talking of difficult emotions, and rather would have dropped the subject and moved on to something else - the dinner programme for that night, or the shabbiness of the bathrooms, or God knew what - if he had not suddenly remembered that this was the exact same place where about a week ago John and he had made a promise not to self-harm anymore.

It had been John’s idea; he had told Brian that if he would promise him not to return to cutting, he would throw away all self-harming tools he possessed. He had thrown them in the bin right next to the pair of swings they were sitting on now, where - knowing the cleaning- and security services at this place - they remained until this very minute. It had been John who had made Brian make a vow, given him the inspiration not to return to his former ways even when the death of Jimmy had made Brian’s heart throb and his fingers itch in a way they had not done in months. Through all of this, it had been John’s promise, the words he had spoken, and the actions he had performed with it, had kept Brian safe; and now it was Brian’s turn to inquire after John and see that he stuck to the promise for his own good. Whether Brian liked talking of difficult matters nor not, and no matter how difficult he sometimes found it to talk to John without feeling that he was a loser, a prude, or a bore - he owed John this.  

‘Still haven’t harmed yourself?’ Brian asked quietly, and John turned to him with a timid yet confident look in his eyes.

‘I haven’t,’ he said, and looked away for a moment. Without following the trail of his eyes, Brian already knew that John had turned his attention to the litter bin, and he knew John was thinking of the exact same thing as he was currently finding himself thinking of: the tools John had disposed of last week. He was, however, unsure if John looked back on that decision as having been a good or a bad one. The answer he gave was not indicative of his own opinion, but rather of his credibility, when he reminded Brian: ‘I promised, after all.’

‘I know,’ Brian said quickly, fearing that John would otherwise think that Brian was asking him this to test if he could trust him to keep his word, or if he had already fished the rusty nail and the canteen knife out of the litter bin in an unsupervised moment. ‘Not that I don’t trust you to keep your promises, just that… this was the place where you proposed throwing away your, eh… the gear you used for cutting and such. It made me think of it,’ Brian said, trying to convince himself that this was at least half of the truth behind why h was asking John this at this exact time and place.

John, luckily, already seemed to have forgotten their previous topic of conversation, and jumped in on the new one. ‘A historical moment, you could almost call it,’ he snickered with one more glance at the bin. ‘I didn’t think I would ever get as far as throwing away my nail, let alone the knife.’

‘Really?’ Brian asked with both a surprised and a worried look in John’s direction. He had supposed John had been attached to his self-harm requirements, but that he himself never thought he would throw them away made Brian shiver inside, especially since he had already made and held on to a serious attempt to stop cutting.

‘Yeah, really. I know what you think about,’ John said, again literally seeming to be able to read his thoughts. ‘That I stopped cutting before that day already. Which is true; I promised myself to stop cutting when I saw you on that first day, and showed you my arm, and you… well, the expression on your face convinced me that it was time to stop. You remember that moment?’

Brian nodded firmly - how could he ever forget that? The moment when, ten minutes after being introduced to his new roommates and being left alone with John as the others headed for dinner, the boy he hardly even knew lifted up his sleeve and laid bare every scratch and welt between his wrist and his elbow. Seeing the labyrinth of cuts on John’s arms had felt so double to Brian; on the one hand it had greatly increased his at times hardly inoppressible desire to lay hands on himself again, while on the other side, seeing how John’s skin seemed to be mutilated beyond repair, made him shiver to the point where he did not think himself capable of picking up a razor blade for that purpose ever again. It had been a mental turning point for him - until that point his main reasons to stop cutting had been that he did not want the psychiatrists at this place looking over his shoulder with ever breath he took out of fear he would stick a knife in his lower arm. But the wounds John had shown him had convinced him not to ever let himself get that far again, or to even get near to it again. For this same reason, when a few days after this event John had offered the vow to both stop harming, he had ceased it with both arms, knowing that he could hold on to this promise with John’s support.

‘I still feel bad about showing you my wounds that day,’ John remarked seemingly out of nowhere, but Brian knew it was not as random as it seemed - the matter still worried him, even though Brian had told him time and time again he should not even think about it.

‘You don’t need to. And you’ve already apologised a thousand times,’ Brian said with a bit of a smile.

John, who kicked off against the muddy grass below him to put the swing in motion again, told him: ‘I just wanted to let you know you were not alone in cutting. I’m just not very socially aware at times. I don’t always know how to… communicate properly with people,’ he mumbled.

Brian could not help smiling at this as well; he know John could be a bit socially awkward and secluded at times, but he did not think John was half as bad as the boy thought himself. ‘I think you’re doing just fine, John.’

‘With you, perhaps. But you’re making it easy for me,’ John said.

‘How’s that?’ Brian said, marvelling at how John managed to surprise him literally half of the time he opened up his mouth.

‘I don’t know. It’s just that… many people at this place are kind of extreme, if you know what I mean. There are people like Freddie and Roger who won’t shut up. Then there are the aggressive people I’d rather stay five miles away from at every event, and then you have people who are even less accessible than I am. And so the list goes on for a bit… And then there’s you.’

Brian, with a never-fading smile on his face, asked: ‘And what’s up with me?’

‘God, I don’t know,’ John said with a shrug, but he tried too hard to make it look casual, and Brian had a feeling that his friend knew very well what it was about him that made John think talking to him was easier, even though Brian himself did not know this reason. ‘I think you just have this quality of approachability.’

‘Approachability?’ Brian repeated. ‘Do you really think so?’ he pondered out loud - being so used to having all his family members, friends, and teachers always characterise him as very shy and hard to get through to, it surprised Brian that anyone would call him approachable, especially someone as socially reclusive as John.

‘To me you are. You’re one of the most approachable people I’ve ever met,’ John said softly, but just when Brian wanted to ask him to go a bit deeper into this interesting detail of their conversation, John declared they should go back to their original topic, almost as if he tried to get away from explaining his statement.

‘But to return the initial conversation,’ John announced, and the topic he went back to seemed so long ago to Brian that he had almost forgotten they had talked of it mere minutes ago. ‘We haven’t talked about you yet. Have you also stuck to our deal of not harming yourself?’

‘Does that in- or exclude yesterday night?’ Brian mumbled, and turned to look at the hands he had folded into his lap. There was no trace left of the blood which had stained his knuckled and the door during his helpless attempt to open the night lock on the door that separated the dormitories from the rest of the building after curfew, but sure enough the repetitive pounding had left its marks on Brian’s hands. Blood had made place for slight but painful scabbing on his knuckles, and a few scratches had seemed unavoidable either. It all looked so silly now that he was looking back on it - no, he did not even want to look back upon the screaming and crying and stomping at the door and God knew what more he had done to embarrass himself last night before John, who - weirdly enough, in Brian’s view - did not seem to think any less of him because of it.

‘Excluding last night,’ John said without making any further comments on the more than a little embarrassing event for Brian. Brian knew it would be nothing like John to rake up anything he felt ashamed of, but still, he was excessively glad that John did not mention the situation more than was absolutely necessary.

‘In that case, I did,’ Brian answered somewhat blankly, mind still focussed on whatever kind of fool he must have looked like the night before rather than on John’s current question. ‘I haven’t cut or scratched or whatever in a long time, and certainly not after our promise.’

‘And mentally?’ John added without skipping a beat, while this second question required Brian to look his way and think it over a few times before to let the meaning of it get to him.

‘Mentally?’

‘Not harming yourself includes not mentally harming yourself either,’ John clarified, and Brian, who nodded in understanding, was now unsure what to say. He knew exactly what John was aiming for - his blaming himself for the death of Jimmy - and knew that in John’s view he definitely had been harming himself mentally by thinking over all the things he could have done and should have done to prevent Jimmy from committing suicide hour after hour. However, since the discussion he had had with his roommate the night before, he had managed to shift the blame away from himself a bit; that was, he still felt terrible about not having been able to save Jimmy, but he was starting to realise that he was not responsible for his death, and that he did not deserve to be tortured and murdered in a similar fashion for what he had neglected to do. This Brian assumed certainly was a step forwards from where he had come from, but he was sure that John would still see this as mental torture that he was inflicting upon himself.

‘It’s hard to put it out of my mind,’ Brian said after a moment of silence, avoiding John’s gaze on purpose. ‘On the one side, since you talked to me last night I think I’ve realised I’m not… you know, responsible for his death. It wasn’t me who convinced him that he should bring an end to his life,’ Brian said carefully. He glanced at John to wait for his confirmation of what he was saying, but John did not answer; he just looked at him and seemed to wait for the inevitable other side Brian had indirectly announced. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t still feel guilty and feel like I haven’t done enough to help him. You know I feel like I fell short.’ Silence, still, from John’s side, as if he understood Brian’s feelings, disagreed with them, but did not know how to tell him this. ‘And it’s just… when we’re busy doing something else I can get the mind of my matter. But when we’re not, I can’t stop thinking of it. And everything around here reminds me of him. You know, only eleven people at group therapy, the thought that a seat in the canteen must be empty every day, and when they put up the obituary…’ Brian summed up, deciding to leave out the part where he had taken the mourning card off the bulletin-board and hid it in his nightstand to prevent violation of any kind.

John was silent for a moment, until eventually he mumbled, in seeming contemplation: ‘Maybe the register was a bad idea.’

‘No, it was not,’ Brian said with more confidence in his voice than he could have wished for. ‘It was very considerate of you, and it was the best way to say goodbye to Jimmy.’

‘It’s easily the best way if it’s the only way,’ John shrugged.

‘You know that’s not what I mean,’ Brian told him, mildly accusatorily towards John’s way of twisting around his words. ‘I thought it was a good idea of you, and I appreciate it. And of course it reminded me of Jimmy, but in a positive way. I was finally able to do something for him, or for his family, at least,’ he said, leaving out the part where it actually had been John who had made major contributions to the message he was planning but failing to write - because by saying that at this point in time, all he would do was take away his gratitude towards John for providing this opportunity of bringing a last moment of honour to Jimmy’s life, which was the last thing he wanted to do right now. ‘And that was exactly what I needed. You know, being able to say some kind of goodbye to him. Because honestly, I could not go on walking around this place without being able to do anything, in any way, for him, any longer.’

‘I see,’ John merely said in reply, seeming to be in mental consultation with himself again. None of them spoke for a moment, and the only form of solace Brian could find from the silence was the creaking of the iron cables of the swing which desperately needed to be oiled up sometimes when he started moving back- and forth to use the swing for its actual purpose instead of just motionlessly sitting on it. He listened to the creaking of the cables, looked at the muddy grass below him, even started counting the number of swings to give himself something to do - five, six, seven, eight, nine-

When John eventually spoke again, it was the question Brian had least expected to hear from him - or from anyone else, really.

‘So you are staying here?’

‘Eh, yes, as far as I’m concerned I am?’ Brian said with audible confusion. Why on earth would John ask him if he was going to stay here? Did he have any other place to be at at this time, other obligations to attend to? A job, school, or a family to hurry back to? As far as Brian was concerned he was here and would stay here until people would agree to send him back home again, but for some reason John did not seem to be so sure of this as he was himself.

‘Truly?’ John asked.

‘Do you want to get rid of me or so?’ Brian laughed with a hint of quizzicality to his own voice. He knew John didn’t want to have him leave the place; at least, that was what he assumed, as they just talked (indirectly, that was) of how glad they were to have each other in this chaos of mentally inflicted people. He wondered what John was trying to bring across, but he did not feel like he was getting anywhere with the answer John supplied him with.

‘No, no, of course not. But I was just wondering…’ John said. He probably intended it to be a complete sentence, but to Brian it felt as if something was missing.

‘I’m not planning on going anywhere. Where else should I go?’ Brian pondered out loud while he threw his eyes up to study the grey sky above him.

‘Last night you said otherwise. You said you’d - you’d leave,’ John reminded him softly. Brian was tempted to open his mouth and ask him what he mean with this at first, but soon enough all the memories flooded over him like an ocean wave attacking the coast. The escaping from the dorm room, the running through the hallway and attempting to open the main door towards the stairs, finding it close, hacking in on the door handle with his knuckles until John found him, then beating the door a bit more and screaming about deserving to hurt himself for what he had done (or failed to do, rather) until John had quite literally captured him with his arms and had made him break down mentally right there and then. It certainly was not exactly Brian’s proudest moment; in fact, it was the thing that out of all embarrassing conversations and events that had happened to him at Queen Mary’s he wished to be able to remove from his own and everyone else’s minds most of all. But right now the focus was not to be on how stupidly he had behaved around John, but on what he had been saying while in his state of anger, fear, helplessness, and vulnerability; and now that he did think about it, he indeed remembered having said something along the lines of wanting to get away from Queen Mary’s. In fact, he remembered them quite clearly now that he gave himself a moment to think of it.

_I need to get out of here, John._

_I can’t hold it out at this place any second longer._

Brian mentally rubbed his temples in complete embarrassment towards whatever it had been that he had said the night before. He had never even thought twice about these sentences, and he never would have expected John to take them seriously. Still, listening to what John was saying right now, it seemed like his roommate actually seemed to have considered a possibility.

‘Were you afraid I was actually gonna leave?’ Brian asked with a touch of ill-hidden surprise in his voice. He knew he shouldn’t, but he could not help being slightly disturbed - taken aback, more like - whenever John showed attachment to other people, and mostly when this was towards him. He could not figure out why someone like John would want to attach himself to a helpless piece of human being like himself; but he had been told that this was just his depression speaking, and that it said nothing about what other people really thought of him and how they valued his presence.

‘Not really, but you know… you never know,’ John concluded even more vaguely than his last sentence. By the way he tried his best to avoid Brian’s gaze and awkwardly tangled his fingers around the chain cables of the swing, Brian could tell that John would not be reassured until he would personally tell him he was not going anywhere.

‘You shouldn’t have to worry, John. Regardless of what I said last night, I’m staying here,’ Brian told him. John nodded, but stayed painfully quiet, and Brian knew his roommate needed more confirmation to know for sure he was not planning on leaving him anywhere soon.

‘John, I’m staying. You know I couldn’t go anywhere even if I wanted. You know that before I can leave, my psychiatrist, therapist, nurse, mentor, the janitor, Holy Virgin Mary, and whoever is the current leader of East Germany unanimously have to agree that I won’t form a threat to the outer world, and then if on top of that I offer my first-born son and the blood of an albino I might have a _chance_ of being released,’ Brian told him, which at last brought a smile to John’s face. For a moment Brian thought he had successfully convinced John he would not leave the institution - if it had not been for the argument John brought up from out of nowhere.

‘But there is a way around it,’ John said in a quaint voice, one Brian had never heard before, folding his hands into his lap and staring at the massive brick building in front of them. Brian was unsure how to interpret the frown on his face - as a sigh of consideration or a sign of pain - but he at any rate was curious to know what John meant with _a way around_.

‘Is there?’ Brian asked John with a frown on his face to match his roommate.

‘There is _always_ a way around,’ John told him with a sudden firmness in his voice that had Brian hooked to know more of whatever it was that John was talking about. ‘Does the word ‘reassessment’ ring a bell?’

 _Reassessment._ That had Brian thinking for a moment. He had heard lots of terms he had never been familiar with before he had entered Queen Mary’s, but reassessment was not one of them. ‘Never heard of it’.

‘Alternatively they sometimes call it mental revaluation,’ John said.

‘Also doesn’t ring a bell,’ Brian admitted.

‘That’s probably because they don’t want you to know,’ John said ominously, and if Brian hadn’t known before that Queen Mary’s was a bit of a queer place, he would have told himself to wake up from this cheap B-rate thriller movie he had somehow been entangled into. However, now that it was at the clinic they had been locked up at, it did not surprise him to find out about policies he had not known existed before - and he was eager to find out what exactly they entailed.

‘Go on,’ Brian encouraged John, who stared at the building before them while he told Brian all he knew of the so-called mental revaluation.

‘So there’s this thing called reassessment, which you can file for if you think you’re ready to leave, but your own psychiatrist doesn’t think you’re ready or hasn’t brought it up yet. They’ll then have another psychiatrist look into your case, talk to your mentor, your parents, and God knows whoever more. If approved, you will be brought before this sort of trial where you have to ‘defend’ your wish to leave and why you think you’re ready when your own psychiatrist disagrees.’

‘That… sure sounds like a process,’ Brian said eventually when he had put all the elements John had just told him of into order in his own mind.

‘It’s quite the process, because Queen Mary’s will be held responsible if you do something awful during early acquittance. I mean, the worst that can happen with people like us two is that we’ll never leave our bedroom again, but there are people in here… You know…’ John said with a vague gesture of his hand, and when Brian looked his way as if he expected him to finish the sentence, he added: ‘there are people with anger issues in here. Schizophrenia, people who can’t distinguish fact and fiction anymore, people who’ve admitted to having rape or murder tendencies. There’s a reason we’re closed in by a wired fence miles away from civilisation,’ John reminded him, and Brian felt himself shudder. Sitting outside on a swing with the calmest, quietest person he had ever met and being completely absorbed in the moment had momentarily made Brian think that this was what life at Queen Mary’s was, but John reminding him of the harsh reality soon brought him back. The moment they would leave the gardens and wander back inside the building, they were likely to be met with utter chaos as usual.

Screaming. Shouting. Fighting. Drug use. Medicine abuse. Threats. Theft. Abuse. Self-harm. Crying at night. Food fights in the canteen. People pulling knives out at each other. Overworked psychiatrists rubbing their temples after having visited yet another psychopath. Nurses running around the place to try and restrain someone suffering a panic attack, a tantrum, or possibly both. Bulimics throwing up in the bathroom after breakfast. Isolation cells. Corpses hanging from the ceiling. He had not been here for two weeks yet and he had already seen it all.

He had seen enough for a lifetime. He knew it would be unwise, but he wished he could leave.

‘So what does this trial look like?’ Brian asked nonchalantly, trying not to let it show that he was taking mental notes of all John was telling him considering this more or less impossible sounding mental revaluation.

‘Oh yeah, trial. They will gather everyone involved in your process to hear their opinion, and if these people agree to give your trial a chance, they will plan a date where you have to defend your case,’ John told him. ‘From what I’ve heard your own psychiatrist will argue you are not ready to leave, and you yourself will have to prove you are ready to go to the judge. That’s usually your former therapist or psychiatrist or whoever send you here, who can judge best if you’ve made progress.’ John told the whole story while lightly kicking against the remaining grass below his feet, not seeming to see the last traces of hope disappearing from his friend’s face when he disclosed this information.

‘The person who sent you here?’ Brian managed to repeat in the smallest voice.

‘The thought behind it is that they know you and are aware of your mental situation and background, but cannot be influenced by recent interaction with you because they haven’t seen you since you got here. Something along those lines I believe…’

Brian was aware that John was rattling on about Queen Mary’s decision to reach out to former psychiatrists to look into your requested mental revaluation, but the words he said no longer reached him. All Brian could think of was what it meant for him _specifically_ to have his former psychiatrist decide on his fate - and this perspective was not a pretty one. To be mentally revised by doctor Sumner, who had manipulated him, threatened to stop all his treatment if he did not give him the answers he was looking for, used him as his guinea pig for the borderline studies he was trying to break through with in the scientific lobby, messed with his medicines, treatment, and feelings just to see what would happen, only to have him being discarded to a mental hospital when he was done playing with him. Brian had resolved the day he had packed his bags and left for Queen Mary’s to never pain himself again by allowing himself to be in the same room as doctor Sumner. Now that it turned out he would need doctor Sumner’s approval to leave the place if he wished to, Brian was resolved to stay at this hell for as long as it took for his own psychiatrist to decide he was ready to face the outside world again.   

‘Something wrong?’ John’s question brought Brian back to reality, forcing him to focus and come up with an answer that would cover up all he had just been pondering about. It was not that he did not want John to know this tale of woe of his. He might open up about it sometimes, but right now, sitting outside and enjoying himself with John’s presence. He did not want to dive into the problems he had experienced with his treatment; he just wanted to be here in the moment.

‘Wrong? No, nothing wrong. Just thinking of how… complicated it all sounds,’ Brian managed. ‘Did anyone ever get through all of this?’

‘Not as far as I can remember,’ John said. ‘In the time that I’ve been here only one person attempted it, but he was denied. Not that that verdict sparked any outrage. He had just spent three weeks in isolation after knocking one of the kitchen staff out of consciousness.’

Though he was getting used to John’s lofty way of recounting incidents and accidents at Queen Mary’s, could not help flashing his friend somewhat of a terrified look. John, who seemed to notice, told him in the same matter-of-fact tone: ‘He’s not here anymore. Got sent to a long-stay clinic.’

Brian, somewhat relieved to know that this person was no longer terrorising Queen Mary’s but fearing for the safety of the population of the clinic he had been sent to instead, nodded apprehensively. John, seeing his roommate did not seem at ease, returned to the previous topic.

‘Anyway, so that’s the reassessment. Oppose your psychiatrist, reach out to your old psych, and prepare for what looks most like a legal battle in the staff room of Queen Mary’s, from what I’ve heard,’ John said with a smile, which Brian copied.

‘It’s good to know. I don’t think I’m ready to leave yet, though,’ Brian admitted.

‘Me neither. But I thought you deserved to know there’s an opportunity, in case you must.’

‘Thank you,’ Brian said, genuinely grateful for the information John was disclosing to him. It really was good to know that one still had the slightest of rights if one felt like one was detained here too long for the wrong reasons. But even though Brian himself often wished he would be back home again without any of the chaos and violence and abuse he was seeing on a daily base while in here, he had really meant it when he had told John he was not ready to leave yet. Queen Mary might have been a chaos, one that terrified him and made him wish he could be miles and miles away from this place, but the prospect of having to face Doctor Sumner again in order to have a slight chance of being released early, was enough to put the idea out of his mind. On top of that, moments like these - being alone with a friend he was very grateful for having made at this place in such a short time - made Brian want to stay. Not even for the treatment, the kindness of most of the staff, or the guidance he was getting here, the people who actually understood him, or at least to a higher degree than his family and his teachers did; just for Freddie, Roger, and mostly for John.

Just when Brian was about to open his mouth and comment on how he was happy to hear that some degree of democracy had been enforced into this place, an alarm ringing from the direction of the building cut him off. The loud, sneering sound cutting through the air startled him, and he leapt up from the swing in one quick movement he did not know he was capable of.

‘My God, is the place on fire?’ he asked distressedly, but John’s calm reaction soon told him that either Queen Mary’s being on fire was a regularly happening event, or something less destructive was currently going on behind those four walls.

‘No, it’s just another drug test,’ John said with a sigh that told Brian it was something his roommate had gotten so used to that it no longer put him off guard. Despite his calm, John did however get up and started walking towards the building they had come from without any further explanation of his intentions.

Brian, who was still slightly struck by the calm reaction and sudden motion of his friend, had to run quite a few steps to catch up with his friend again. ‘Do we have to check in at the wardens at the door we just came from?’

‘No, we don’t,’ John said quickly, although he just as soon got back to his reply. ‘I mean, that’s probably what we’re supposed to do, but we won’t.’

Brian, jogging behind his ever-faster moving friend, could not oppress a frown. ‘We won’t?’

John did not answer his question either with words or with a movement of the hand - all he said was ‘follow me’. Brian followed his advice and ran after him without thinking; he trusted John, who had been here for a much longer time and should know a lot more about how to handle drug tests than he did. Still, hearing that they probably had to gather around the wardens and follow their instructions while John’s intentions seemed to be to do the complete opposite, was not something Brian felt comfortable with, and he could not help showing his cautiousness towards John’s plans.

‘Where are you-’

‘Ask any questions you have later,’ John told him impatiently, grabbing him by the wrist and tugging him along with him.

Brian, who struggled not to trip over his own feet, frowned when they half-walked, half-ran towards the building. He did not see how John wanted to escape the guards by literally running into their direction, but just when he was afraid they would enter the sight of the wardens who he expected were guarding the door to make sure no one could leave the building during this drug test he had just been informed of, John moved towards the right and dodged the back exit of the building. With what seemed to be the speed of sound, he ran towards one of the side-buildings, two small brick sheds that just like the exit hall had been added to the eighteenth century building. Brian could not help frown for what must have been at least the tenth time that day; he had seen the brick buildings before, and had been told the staff kept gardening tools in them which they would use to control the wilderness around their premises if they ever had the time. After having witnessed multiple failed attempts of people to open the heavy wooden doors or break into them, he knew it was virtually impossible to enter them, and wondered what on earth John thought he was going to achieve by storming towards them.

‘We can’t open those doors,’ Brian told him during their run for the sheds, but he was informed that the sheds were not, in fact, their purpose.

‘It’s not the sheds, it’s what’s behind them,’ John told him mysteriously, passing the two sheds and suddenly coming to a halt. He smoothed his hand along the brick wall that connected the shed to the actual building, feeling at the rough surface while glancing around him to make sure no one was paying attention to the pair of them.

‘What are you-‘ Brian asked, but John put his index finger to his lips and continued to smooth his fingers along the bricks that Brian suddenly understood were not bricks like the ones the rest of the sheds were made of - they were camouflage of some sort. Camouflage made of wood, or on top of a wooden door perhaps, which John managed to open by hooking his thumb behind the door and jerking it open. He leapt inside the narrow area that opened up before them with what seemed to be great satisfaction.

Brian, on the other side, could do nothing but stand still in front of the camouflaged door John had just pulled open from out of nowhere. He had heard and read stories of secret meeting places or getaways at old buildings like these, but he never would have pictures himself ending up in one, let alone that John out of all people would be the one to engage in such business. There was at the moment however little time to wonder at John’s inventiveness, for his friend had a look of impatience on his face and motioned for Brian to step into the space.

‘Come on!’ John hissed through clenched teeth. Brian, though he put a step forwards to join him, did not quite walk through the door yet.

‘What is this?’

‘Explanation will follow,’ John promised, as he again grabbed Brian’s arm and pulled him inside the space. The door was quickly shut behind Brian’s back, closing him off from the gardens of Queen Mary’s and landing him into what seemed to him like an entirely new world.

While John worked on securing the door into its previous position, Brian tried to make sense out of whatever it was he was currently finding himself at. Upon first entering the space his eyes had attempted to get used to the surrounding darkness, but it turned out there was no necessity for this. The area was walled in at four sides, but no roof was blocking the sunlight to enter from above, making it surprisingly light inside this cave, or whatever one would call it. Closed in between brick on three sides and wood on the remaining sides was an open space of what Brian estimated was about eight feet long and three feet wide. Standing against one brick wall, he could touch the other side with his fingertips. For a moment claustrophobia seemed to get its grip on him, but he reminded himself of how the improvised wooden door was easy to be pushed open from the inside, and how - more than that - he had no reason to fear now that he was in here with John.

Speaking of John… Brian turned around just in time to see his friend laying his hands off the door, spin around to face him, and - with a bit of a bashful smile, spoke to him: ‘I figure you have some questions.’

‘I have… several,’ Brian mumbled while once again glancing through the pit he had entered into a minute before, and which continued to fascinate if not frighten him.

‘Sit down with me and I’ll talk you through it,’ John half-ordered, half-invited him. Brian nodded, but was not too sure of where to sit. The floor was dark and barren, and looked as if grass had grown on it long ago, before the curbing of most of the sunlight had exterminated whatever plants or weeds had grown on this narrow strip of land. Brian sought for a place where he might best sit down without dirtying his trousers too badly, wondered if maybe he should crouch instead of actually sitting down - but when John simply plumbed down against the back wall and stretched out his legs across the length of the ground, Brian followed his example and sat down cross-legged against the long-sided wall. The bricks felt cold against his back and the ground was still slightly wet from whenever the last rain shower had been. But, as John did not complain, Brian did not either.

‘Right,’ John started off as he stretched his arms above his head. ‘This is what I call my cave.’

‘It sure looks like one,’ Brian said, peering up against the steep walls of their enclosure.

‘I know it’s a bit primitive, but it’s the only spot at this Godforsaken place I know for sure I’ll have privacy,’ John said. Brian nodded in agreement; he had not needed more than two days to figure out that one could not even go to the bathroom in peace when surrounded by two hundred fifty other people day and night, and totally understood John’s need to have a space he knew for sure he would not be bothered at.

‘How did you find this place? Or did you create it yourself?’ Brian asked him.

‘I found it,’ John said, tracing one finger through the muddle surface they were sitting on. ‘I often went outside to be on my own - which is something I enjoy doing, as you might know,’ he said with a smile, ‘and I would sit against the wall of the building, just a few metres outside of this cave. I would just, you know, sit there and stare at my surroundings, when one day I noticed that the brick layer between the shed and the building seemed… different. The stones seemed to be made of slightly different material, so I stood up and felt at them. They felt like bricks, but when I knocked on them, they made a much duller sound than stone does. Turned out it were not brick, but a thin layer of imitation bricks made of wood, as you’ve seen when I pulled open the wall - or door, more like.’

Imitation bricks made of wood. Again something Brian had seen in cheap B movies, but not something he would encounter at a clinical institution. What would be the use of having a narrow strip of barren ground walled off by a fake brick wall? Who was responsible for the creation of a seemingly useless place like this, and what had been their intentions?

‘But who… What is the purpose of this place? Why would a place like Queen Mary’s have this…  fake brick wall to hide a place of seven by three feet of absolutely nothing?’ Brian pondered out loud.

John raised his shoulders in silent reply. ‘I have no idea. Who _ever_ knows what’s going on at this place…’ John said, before he returned to his story. ‘What I do know is that I managed to push one of the bricks slightly to the side, hook my fingers behind the wood, and open this door. And ever since then I’ve claimed this place for my own.’

‘I see,’ Brian said, still pondering the meaning of this place. It was probably just failing structural design, a place that was hard to supervise which the staff had made invisible to prevent people from dealing drugs or engaging in other lousy activities where they could not be overseen. Whatever it was, John had made it his own private retire, which seemed like a good enough purpose to Brian.

‘So that’s the story. This is where I tend to hide when I’ve had enough of people, or when they announce drug or weapon searches and the like,’ John declared.

The mentioning of the drug test brought back the event that was currently going on in Queen Mary’s, and Brian felt a sting of fear in his chest. It was all fine and well sitting here, but weren’t they missing out on an official routine check they had to undergo right now? Wouldn’t they be marked as absent and face repercussions of whatever sort? Wouldn’t their absence be held against them sooner or later?

‘But those drug tests, right? Won’t they notice that we’re not there?’ Brian asked, trying not to sound concerned but definitely not managing.

‘No, probably not. _Definitely_ not, I mean,’ John corrected himself. ‘I’ve only attended like two or three drug tests because I couldn’t get away, and no one’s ever even asked where I was during drug testing. No one from the staff anyway.’

Brian nodded, but was not entirely convinced yet. ‘But don’t they have like… I don’t know, some kind of system to see if everyone’s been tested?’

‘Well, they try, but as long as I’ve been here they’ve failed miserably,’ John chuckled. ‘Look, they send out a number of staff members with name lists around the place to try and collect everyone. So far so good, but the list is usually not updated. I doubt if they’ve put your name on it yet, and I’m sure they haven’t taken Jimmy’s name off either,’ John said. Brian bit his lip at the hearing of the name of the deceased, but nodded soon enough, and John continued.

‘Secondly, there’s no system to check who’s been tested and who hasn’t. They tried drug tests with giving people paper bracelets to mark them as tested, but these got passed around the moment they were dispersed to the first patients, so they stopped that project again. Now they just have those papers, but they don’t communicate, so you can just say that you’ve been tested by someone else already and they’ll let you go. And often someone will put up a row, demand all the attention from the guards, so the rest of the group can flee... And ultimately, some people like us just hide and come out after like an hour, when they are sure the staff must have given up in the meantime.’

Brian, though he understood how this flawed system worked in favour of patients who wanted to duck drug testing, was still not convinced that dodging would work. ‘And won’t anyone tell on you?’

‘I think we left that level of pettiness behind after kindergarten,’ John answered, and Brian could not help blushing a little. It indeed would have been childish to tell on other people, but since the population of Queen Mary’s in its entirety had not shown itself to be outstanding in its kindness, it would not have surprised him if people who disliked each other would do whatever they could to annoy each other. Then again, John was probably too socially secluded to have any enemies at this place, and Brian was sure that no more than about a dozen of people actually knew his name (instead of ‘the new guy who challenged Drew’), which made him believe they were rather safe.

John, who seemed to notice the blush on Brian’s face after the last comment he had made, told him: ‘You see, of course not everyone likes each other at this place, but we do know that at the end of the day, if we have to choose, it’s us against them. We’ll form a front against the staff if necessary.’

Brian was unsure if that was the goal of a mental institution, to have the patients form a front against the people they were supposed to trust and work with. But, not wanting to sound like a complete nerd - and understanding not everyone was up for being drug tested every other day at random intervals - he decided not to dwell on that for too long.

‘So these drug tests, when you can’t escape them,’ Brian said. ‘What are they like?’

‘From what I remember - it’s been a while, I have to confess - they first look at your eyes to see if your pupils are dilated, which is a common symptom of cocaine or LSD use. They take urine samples which they test at the apothecary, and they check all your clothes for drugs. That includes underwear,’ John added, and Brian could not help grimacing.

‘Do they think we have boxer short pockets to hide our joints in?’ Brian pondered out loud - which he deemed to be a stupid, childish comment a second after having made it. John was able to laugh about it though, much to his relief.

‘Yeah, and we stick joints inside our waistbands. God, do they honestly think people would carry drugs with them instead of burying it inside the filling of their mattress or under the leg of their bed?’ John said, which gave Brian new insight into the inventiveness people developed at a place like Queen Mary’s.

‘No, but for the record, it’s not that I flee from those drug tests because I have anything to hide,’ John said. ‘I just don’t like being stripped practically naked in the middle of the canteen.’

‘Understandable,’ Brian agreed.

‘And it’s such a waste of time. Not that I usually have a lot to do, but I’d rather spend my time sitting in a cave than waiting while the staff collects urine samples from whoever they can find,’ John stated. Brian nodded in response, not even noticing a silence had fallen between the pair of them until John filled it up by saying: ‘Especially when the sitting in the cave is with someone like you.’

Brian looked into the direction of his friend and blinked a few times, as if to recall if he really had just heard these words correctly, or if his brain was playing tricks on him. He was inclined to believe the latter, but when he saw John evading his eyes and instead focus on rolling up the sleeve of his shirt to give himself something else to do, he was rather positive he had just heard those overly honest words correctly.

Brian, though flattered by these words, needed a moment to come up with a decent reply. He had established by now that he was the only one John did not mind to have around him, but to hear that John even preferred his presence over being on his own, really felt like more than a compliment coming from someone as socially secluded as John - it felt like an honour.

Still, shy as ever, Brian answered humbly: ‘I can’t imagine it being so interesting having me here. Having someone like Freddie or Roger to hide with would probably be a bigger adventure.’

After a bit of silence as to contemplate this idea, John said: ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never shown anyone this place.’

‘Never?’ Brian asked.

‘No, never. I always went out to the gardens on my own, and even if I was with someone else, I didn’t want to show them this spot. I don’t want people to take over my cave from me, or have every other person know where to find me when I go missing for a few hours,’ John explained. ‘Freddie and Roger know just about where to find me in case it’s really pressing, but even they have never actually been inside here.’

Brian, now feeling even more honoured by John’s decision to show him his cave, said: ‘I promise I won’t tell anyone about this place, or show up here from out of the blue without your permission.’

‘You can drop by here any time you like. You’re not any other person, after all. You’re my friend. And I‘d rather go here with you than be here on my own anyway.’

This confession from John’s side was more than Brian ever could have thought him to utter, and he had no idea how to reply to these words that made him feel warm deep inside. He felt as if winning the lottery could not compare to the friendship he had found with John at this place, how great it felt to finally have met someone he could trust, he could talk to, he could hang out with, someone who made him feel safe, and mostly, someone who made him feel like he was not alone. Loneliness was a feeling he had dealt with for years and years, both physically and emotionally, to the point where he had not thought anyone could ever drag him out of the pit of darkness he had fallen into. To have found John in a time like this was more than he ever could have wished for. John was the winning ballot out of the lottery, and Brian would not trade him for a million pound.

Brian was lost inside a world of sunlight and butterflies that made the narrow cave look like a palace and the muddy ground they were sitting on feel like a golden carpet, when he was suddenly called back out of his dreams by the same person who had put him into them.

‘What are you thinking about?’

Brian faced John, but only for a moment, knowing that he was again blushing - as he seemed to do way too often in John’s presence - and felt himself at a loss for words. He could not tell John that he was dreaming about how he felt like he had entered Heaven upon entering the cave if he did not want to come across as if he had lost his mind, but what he should say instead, he did not know. His brains were spinning for a sensible answer to John’s question, but just when he feared the silence hanging between the two of them was starting to last uncomfortably long, it was broken up by a shout from what seemed to be not too far away from them.

_‘Lock the door behind you! Let no one get in or out!’_

_‘You’ve got the list?’_

_‘I do. Security! Everyone over here right now!’_

At the sound of the shouting voices of multiple voices just around the corner, Brian could not help jumping up from his spot and clutch his hands over his mouth. He stared in terror at his friend, who - much to his surprise, even though he knew it should not surprise him any longer - remained seated and did not seem moved to any agree by the shouting.

‘Just the staff continuing the drug search outside. They know people tend to flee the building when they announce drug tests, so they’ve now locked the doors and search the gardens,’ he explained calmly while gesturing for Brian to sit down again. Brian shakily obliged, but out of fear of anyone hearing them and dragging them out of their safe space, he did not dare say a word until John practically dragged his words out of him.

‘What’s up, Brian? They’ll never hear us now,’ John encouraged his friend when the voices of the staff had vanished into the distance.

‘I don’t know,’ Brian whispered eventually. ‘I just… can’t get around how weird things are at this place. How strange things seem here compared to where I come from.’

‘Such as?’ John asked - not as if he genuinely had no idea life inside the walls of Queen Mary’s was very different from how their days looked like, but because he wanted Brian to speak up about what was bothering him.

‘Look, I know that life at university wasn’t ideal, but at least we did not get chased for drug tests. I’ve never had a knife pointed at me, or, or walked in on a friend sick from drug withdrawal, or violent fights in the canteen, and I’ve never walked in on… on someone’s _corpse_ hanging from the ceiling,’ Brian whispered in so small a voice that it surprised him John could still hear him. He knew for a fact that he had, though, when John got up from his space and quite literally crawled over to Brian’s side of the cave on his knees.

‘Watch out, you’ll ruin your trousers-’ Brian whispered.

‘As if I care about my trousers in a situation like this,’ John answered as he settled as close next to him as he could. Brian could feel John’s shoulder against his own, their legs stretched out in front of them before them, and a sense of protection downed on him. This was, next to friendship and genuine connection with other people, a sensation he also had not felt in way too long a time. The way his former psychiatrist treated him and his medical files, together with his parents’ betrayal of him when they had sent him away from home, school, and everything he knew, had taken away the last sense of security he had known in his life. To now find protection in John, who he knew was not the strongest man around but who he realised in this instance would do all he could to make him feel as safe as he could, meant the world to him. He wished he could hold on to John, clamp on to him like a vice and never let go of him. This was an unrealistic wish, but deep inside his heart, he knew that mentally and emotionally John would be there for him to protect him and make him feel safe.

Brian could almost not hold back his tears when John spoke to him the exact words he had needed to hear. ‘Listen, Brian. I know life here is not easy. I know there are violent people, treacherous people, people who just want to hurt you and kick against everyone and everything just because they can, and because they feel helpless and insecure themselves, and need to hurt others to feel better. But we know better than that. We stand above that kind of behaviour, don’t we?’

Brian, who felt a tear dripping down his cheek but did not dare wipe it away out of fear John would notice, nodded weakly in response.

‘We’re better than that, and we’ll stand up against them and not let them get us down. We’ll form a front against them. They can attack us individually, but as long as we stand together, they cannot get us down. Do you agree?’

Brian wanted to nod again, let John know he whole-heartedly agreed with his words, but he couldn’t; not as long as the image of Jimmy’s corpse, hanging from the ceiling after he had failed to protect him from the bullying, the torturing, the breaking of his soul. Had not Brian stood together with him? Had he not shown to be on Jimmy’s side, formed a front with him against those bullies, those people who just aim to hurt others for their own egos and their own pleasure? And had they not lost a life to the bullies, even though they stood united?

‘But Jimmy,’ Brian whispered. ‘I formed a front with him. I wanted to, at any rate. And they still got him down.’

‘I know, Brian. And you did well in standing up for him, you did all you could, but help came too late for him. He had been on his own for too long, and that’s why they got them down. But we won’t let that happen again. And most of all I will not let that happen to _you_ ,’ John said. Brian was aware he had not been able to oppress his tears completely anymore, but when he felt John’s fingers closing around the back of his hand, he just let his tears run free.

Even though he managed to stay perfectly silent, he had a feeling that John knew he was crying, for his friend suddenly said: ‘you need something to get your mind of the matter and enjoy life again.’

Since John probably already knew he was crying anyway, Brian turned to face him with tearstained cheeks, and John gave him a bit of a smile.

‘You need something to keep you busy, and I think I know what that should be.’

‘And that is?’ Brian inquired.

The smile on John’s face grew wider. ‘You’ll see. Give me a week or so and you’ll see.’

_# # #_

John had been right; the something-to-keep-you-busy-thing he had promised was indeed the perfect tool to keep Brian busy for a few days, but not in the sense one might expect; the thing that was most occupying Brian was wondering what on earth John had been talking about, and what or when to expect it. John did not want to disclose a word about it the few times Brian had gently tried to pry, and Freddie and Roger did not seem to know anything either. Whether they really did not know a thing or if John made them swear not to give away a single detail was something Brian was unsure of; all he knew was that he did not seem to get any further by asking or pondering about it, and thus in time let go of the subject. Maybe it had just been something John had said in the moment to distract him from the topic of Jimmy’s death and the violence and drug tests and all more at Queen Mary’s, which was something Brian could not blame his friend for - at that given point in time, he really had needed some distraction, and his quasi-promise had worked.

Life at Queen Mary’s continued in the meanwhile. Their daily routines were put back in place, as far as it was ever possible to ensure a routine at a mental institution. There seemed to pass not a single day that was not disturbed by violence or unruliness of some kind. If it was not everyone being evacuated out of the apothecary because someone was trying to break into the medicine boxes for more antidepressants, it would be someone sticking their fork inside someone’s forehead during dinner. Fights were daily business and ensued everywhere; people could make a fuss over things Brian never would have thought worth the fuss before entering the regime, such as having to wait in line for the shower, or whose turn it was to choose the TV channel in the ‘living room’ of Queen Mary’s. Roger got sick once more after having taken a weird sort of pill someone had offered him and which the four of them to that day had not figured out what exactly it had been, and John had personally delivered Freddie to the nurse when he refused to eat for three meals in a row. This had not exactly worked in favour of the bond between the two, but, deep down knowing John had done right, Freddie soon returned to sit at their table during lunch.

It was right after said meal one day, about five or six days after John and Brian’s escapade to the cave during the first drug search Brian had encountered, when the four boys found themselves hanging about in their room. The weather was poor, Roger was still sick from the weird pill all of them had scolded him over for taking, and Freddie had been banned from the exercise room after John had delivered him to the medics for not eating, meaning that the four of them found themselves stuck into their dorm room. Roger was on the brink of dozing into an illness-instigated sleep, John was lying on his bed and looking at the ceiling. Brian had grabbed a book on the forming of gas planets from the library, but found it terribly boring for the endless descriptions he did not need to understand the matter. Freddie was the only one trying to encourage contact between the four of them. He had fixed some kind of lousy looking board game from the activity room, and while setting everything out on the small table in the middle of the room, he was trying to convince the others to play with him.

‘Come on, guys, playing games is fun! Just like we used to do with our families on rainy days!’ Freddie said while straightening out the carton board that had been mutilated by previous users.

‘Sometimes I feel like you just want to press it into our faces that we all have been diagnosed with depression and you don’t,’ John commented, and Brian snickered.

‘I _don’t_ ,’ Freddie let him know. ‘I just want to excite you. This game should be great fun.’

‘It sure looks like it,’ John said sarcastically, earning a dirty look from Freddie.

To prevent tension rising between the two boys again following their last altercation about John having sent Freddie to the nurse, Brian decided to take the lead of the conversation. ‘I’ve never seen it before. What’s it called?’

‘Eh… I’m not sure,’ Freddie admitted.

‘Doesn’t it say so on the box?’ Brian asked.

‘It does,’ Freddie said. ‘But I can’t read it.’

‘Art school is what you did, right?’ John teased, and was told to shut up by Freddie, which only seemed to amuse John more.

‘I did art school, yes, where we studied _art_. Not Dutch or German or Norse or whatever this is,’ Freddie said as he threw the upper case of the box towards John’s bed. It landed on John’s leg, where it stayed while John propped himself up on his elbows. Refusing to reach over and read the box comfortably, John peered at it from a distance to make out the letters.

‘Mensch ärgere dich nicht,’ John read out loud in the poorest German accent Brian had ever heard, and he could not help snickering into the pages of the book while John frowned. ‘No idea what that means. Isn’t there an English translation?’

‘There doesn’t seem to be,’ Freddie said when he held the remaining side of the box upside down. ‘There’s a paper with game rules but it’s all in German,’ he said as he stood up and dropped the paper on top of the book Brian was reading, as if he expected his roommate to be able to make more out of the foreign language than he did.

Brian, even though he knew he would hardly be able to read a word of the text, still turned to it and scanned over it - upon which he discovered something interesting. ‘It’s not all in German, Freddie. It’s also in Polish, Russian, and what I think is… I don’t know, Hungarian or Romanian?’ he chuckled. ‘I think we should send this game to the other side of the Berlin Wall, where it probably comes from.’

John laughed, and Freddie looked displeased, frantically trying to make sense out of the handful of game pieces and dices Brian doubted they would all need. However, he was not familiar with the game, so for all he knew one had to toss five different dices for five different game pieces in one round, so he decided not to present himself as a judge on that.

A knock on the door distracted everyone inside the room from what they were doing. Now that all of them were together in their dorm and they did not tend to hang out with other people who would randomly show up at their place. Freddie, Brian, and John faced each other for a moment, until John was the first to raise his shoulders, turn around, and bury his head below his pillow.

‘If it’s another room search for weapons or drugs or whatever, they can do whatever they like but I am _not_ getting up from this bed,’ he clarified, after which he fell silent. Brian and Freddie were now left to stare at each other while the person outside their room knocked again.

‘Hello? Anyone in here?’

‘Sounds like Nolan,’ Freddie said as he leapt up from his sitting position, quick enough to leave him dizzy and having to grasp onto the sink for balance. Brian gave him a concerned look, which did not ease when Freddie told him he had not had any breakfast that morning.

‘You can come in, dear,’ Freddie said while tearing the door open and revealing the person they had been expecting to see. Brian had turned back to his book to make it look like he was not prying at Nolan upon whose entrance, but the large box his mentor was holding in hands certainly caught his attention.

‘Hi, guys. Brian,’ Nolan greeted his student, who smiled politely in return. Brian saw Nolan’s eyes wandering off to the two beds opposite of each other, each of which was currently occupied, which was a point of concern to Nolan at the current point in time.

‘Have half of you come down with the flue, then? We’ve had quite some cases this week,’ he said to Freddie, who shook his head at first but then changed this movement to a nod.

‘Roger’s not feeling too well, I think he might have some symptoms of the flu. You know, fever, vomiting, sore throat, that sort of thing…’ Freddie made up, trying to pass off Roger’s drug-related illness as the fever that was apparently going around at Queen Mary’s. ‘There’s nothing wrong with John, though. John’s just… being himself,’ he said, and Brian could swear he heard John grumble into his pillow upon hearing himself being talked of in this manner.

Nolan did not seem to notice, luckily, for he was cheerful as ever when he said: ‘I’m glad he’s going well, because I have a parcel for him. Something he ordered the other week.’

Upon hearing a parcel had arrived, John turned around in bed to see. Once his eyes had adjusted enough to see the box his mentor was holding in hands, he got up from the bed quicker than Brian had ever seen him do before. He walked towards Nolan without any reluctance, like he normally would do when called out of bed, and took the parcel from him.

‘Thanks for bringing it over, Nolan,’ John said, sounding genuinely grateful for a chance. He walked back to his bed again, placing the box in his lap and shaking it carefully as to check the contents.

‘No problem. We know you don’t generally check your mail box often, so it seemed a better idea to bring it over. Also saves space, of course, not having that box standing about in the post room,’ Nolan said with a nod towards the box. However, seeing that John - and with him, the rest of the room, including Roger who had been awoken by the sound of the intruder -  was more focussed on the parcel than on him, he decided to take his leave.

‘Anyway, I see you were busy playing a game, so I’ll leave you to it. See you soon!’

‘See ya, dear!’ Freddie said as he politely let Nolan out, after which he was quick to shut the door and make his way over to the place of action. Sitting down on the bed next to Brian, who he urged to put down his dreadfully boring book, he encouraged Roger to draw nearer as well and have John unpack the box that had arrived.

‘Roger, get over here! John’s gotten a parcel for the first time I remember,’ he said when a sleepy, feverish-looking Roger propped himself up on his mattress. The boy tried to get up, but after having put a shaky foot to the floor, decided to pull it back underneath the blankets again and regard the scene from the foot end of his own bed.

‘It seems like all of you are more excited about my parcel than I am myself,’ John snickered and started working out how to open the box. Scissors, knives, or even letter openers were out of question, so soon he found himself peeling of the hard-headed duct tape with his fingernails. It was not a very effective method, nor was it fast enough to the liking of Freddie, who leapt up from the bed and started helping his roommate.

‘I have longer nails, darling. Let me do it,’ he said, working his nails between the tape and the carton box and ripping off a long line of it at once.

‘You do have to leave the surprise to John,’ Roger’s weak voice demanded from his corner of the room, so soft Brian wondered if Freddie - who did not reply - had heard him.

John had, in any case. ‘It’s not so much a surprise to me, to be honest. I know it can practically only be one thing,’ John said with a smug, contented smile on his face - a smile that only broadened when Freddie stepped back with a hand full of tangled-up duct tape and left him to open the box.

‘Let’s have a look…’ John said as he folded the carton edges outwards and peered inside the box with a never-fading smile. ‘That looks good, very good. Exactly what I was hoping for.’

‘What is it?’ Roger asked from the other side of the room, and Brian, who likewise could not see the contents of the box, was eager to find out what was going on - especially when Freddie started cooing over the object as well.

‘No way, John! That is marvellous!’ Freddie commented, covering his mouth with his teeth in surprise to whatever it was the two of them were sharing between them at the moment.

‘What is-’ Brian was halfway through the question he wanted to task, when John took the item out of the carton box. What first appeared was a long piece of wood, the upper side of which was a bit broader than the middle part. When further pulled out of the box, Brian was positive his jaw must have dropped, which positively must have made him look stupid, but which he could not care less about - not when John pulled out a guitar from the box.

‘God! An entire guitar?’ Brian asked in total surprise and shock, having trouble believe that what he was seeing was actually happening before his eyes, and was not going to be a beautiful dream he was soon going to wake up from. It had been weeks, more than three weeks since he had last beheld a guitar, or any instrument for that matter, and he had not expected to ever see one during his stay at Queen Mary’s. To now witness his roommate pull out an electric guitar, brand new and just begging to be played, was more than he ever could have hoped for while in here.

‘I am glad it came in its entirety, yes,’ John smiled as he put the box aside and create more space for himself and the rest of them to study the guitar at close quarters. Brian was sitting on the edge of the mattress while John smoothed his fingers along the strings, the neck, and the body of the guitar. The instrument had clearly never been used before, with its strings perfectly secured and its wooden casing shining like a brand new penny. Brian was in awe, and he could not hold this emotion back.

‘Oh my lord, John… How did you get that?’ Brian asked with his bright, surprised eyes focussed on John, who sent him a smile.

‘Remember the privilege system we talked about? You can collect points to get privileges, like books, family visits, sweets, and activities… I’ve been here for some while, have never really been caught doing things wrong-’

‘Save not showing up when you don’t feel like it,’ Freddie corrected him.

‘… have never done anything grievously wrong like starting a fight or trying to drown someone in the toilet, and have gotten loads of those privilege points I never used. Apparently they were enough to exchange them for a guitar,’ John said.

‘I see, but I mean… How did they allow you to have a guitar? They told me instruments are forbidden when I wanted to take mine,’ Brian asked.

‘They are, in principle. They’re afraid people will make lots of noise and drive others crazy, which will end up in fights… But when I told Nolan I wanted an electric guitar, he did not complain at all. He knows I’m not the trouble-making type, so he trusts me with it.’

‘He was probably even happy to finally be able to do something for you, who never wants to do anything or talk to anyone,’ Freddie told John while grating his knuckles over his friend’s hair. Brian hardly noticed the messing around of the two; he was mesmerised by the guitar John was holding in hands, and wanted nothing more than to hold it in his own hands, to put his fingers across the strings and play it, even if it was only for half a minute. Even ten seconds he would be happy with; he just needed to hold it in his hands for a moment, to be ensured he would not be deprived of his favourite instrument during the entirety of his stay at this hell.

‘John?’ Brian asked, which he knew was way too soon for him to ask any favours, but he could not help himself. ‘Can I hold it for a moment?’

‘Of course,’ John said, as he got up and placed the guitar in the hands Brian was holding in front of him with the palms turned towards the ceiling, as if one would place a precious newborn into his hands. To him, the difference between holding a baby and holding a guitar was not that large at this given moment; if anything, he would handle the guitar with even more care and look at it more tenderly than he would if he would be given a child to hold. Simply every aspect of the guitar was beautiful; its neck, its tight, unplayed strings, its smooth wooden body and fine finish. It was pure workmanship, and Brian felt like he was holding the crown jewels.

‘I never thought I would hold a guitar while in here,’ Brian said, still fascinated by the mere presence of the instrument. ‘Can I touch it?’

‘You already are,’ John snickered. Another time another place, Brian would have worried about having asked such a stupid question, but all he could do now that he had been given permission to actually use the guitar for its purpose, he did not mind going over what he had said. Placing the guitar in a more natural position against his chest, with one hand on the fretboard and one on the strings at the height of the sound hole, Brian gently dragged his fingers vertically across the strings. He was utterly careful at first; he did not, of course, want to do anything to harm the brand new guitar, or make noise that would attract the staff towards their room to check what on earth was going on. But the soft, first tunes he produced by trying out the strings seemed to be contagious, and Brian could not help gradually moving his fingers across the strings quicker and with more power and determination to produce an actual rhythm. Brian would have gotten lost in the moment if it had not been for the encouraging pat Freddie gave him on his back, which brought him back to reality.

‘I can’t believe you got yourself a guitar,’ Brian said dreamily without being able to tear his eyes off the instrument he was holding in hands. ‘I didn’t even know you played.’

‘I’ll tell you a little secret right there,’ John said. ‘I don’t.’

These last two words were strong enough to make Brian get his head out of the clouds, and he turned to John with a confused, be it a bit of a shocked reaction. ‘You don’t? You don’t play?’

‘Not a single tune,’ John smiled apologetically, which only heightened Brian’s confusion.

‘Then why did you…?’ Brian asked him. The smile on John’s face grew wider, warmer, and everyone around the room seemed to understand what he was hinting at apart from Brian himself, judging by the look Roger and Freddie exchanged between each other.

‘Because this is for you.’

 _This is for you. This is for you._ Brian knew deep inside what these words meant in the given context, but he couldn’t convince himself that this really was what John was getting at. It would be too good to be true, and Brian needed to check if what he had heard, had bn heard correctly. ‘What do you…’

‘That this guitar, which I ordered through my name and good behaviour points or God knows what, I ordered so I could give it to you,’ John explained to Brian.

‘This guitar is for me? For me only?’ Brian asked, even more perplexed than he had been before.

‘It’s all yours,’ John told him. Brian stared at him, unable to turn his eyes away from John - eyes that threatened to spill tears when John reminded him of the promise Brian had already told himself to put out of his head by telling him: ‘Something to get your mind off the matter.’

The flashbacks started coming back to Brian the moment John reminded him of these words he had spoken to him that day. The book of last messages for Jimmy, going outside together, revaluating their promise to each other not to self-harm anymore. John telling him of the revaluation method Brian knew would be impossible for him if it meant he would have to stand face-to-face with doctor Sumner again. The alarm announcing the drug search, upon which John had taken him with him to his cave; the sitting together on the cold ground and talking as if security was not chasing after them and others like a bunch of lunatics. That was when Brian had broken, told John that life at Queen Mary’s was asking so much of him, that the memory of Jimmy haunted him, upon which John had said that he needed something to get his mind off the matter - and that he knew exactly what this was going to be.

And now, holding the electric guitar John had arranged for him by exchanging God knew how many points of good behaviour, Brian knew it, too.

‘So this is… what you had in mind that day?’ he whispered, never taking his eyes off John’s, whose glance had turned soft and tender.

‘I did. I just could not tell you what my plan was because back then I could not guarantee they would let me have a guitar. I did not want to get your hopes up and then let you down,’ John said softly.

As if you could possibly ever let me down, Brian thought to himself, but he could not utter these words. There were so many things he wished to say, but he found out that he could manage none of them. _Thank you. Thank you so much. You have no idea how much this means to me. This is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. You’ve made my day, my week, my month, my year, my entire stay at Queen Mary’s for however long that might be. You have no idea what you mean to me._

Finding that none of these words could pass his lips at the given moment in time, Brian came to the conclusion that he had to show John his thankfulness in a different was, one that did not require spoken words. He shakily stood up from the bed, clutching on to the guitar in one hand, and stepping over to John’s bed. Before he could even think about what he was going to do (and probably talk himself out of it), he sat down next to John and threw both of his arms, including the guitar, around his friend to hug him in an attempt to bring across the thanks he at the moment could not vocalise.

John, at first, seemed tense when Brian enveloped his torso with his arms. This was not, however, because of a natural resistance against physical contact - it was simply that he had not expected Brian to go all out and trap him in a hug all of a sudden. None of the people present in the room seemed to have foreseen this event, though, for Freddie and Roger looked just as surprised, especially when John was quick to give in and hug Brian back.

‘Oooh, would you look at that! Our two introverts acting out,’ Freddie cooed, but Brian was hardly aware of what his roommates were doing around them. He had better things to focus on at the moment, such as how good it felt to hold John close, to hug him as tightly as possible while at the same time clinging on to the best present he had ever received by anyone in his life. He could still not believe John had arranged a guitar for him, had gone to such a length to fix him something ‘to get his him of the matter’, as his friend had called it roughly a week ago.

What he also could not believe, was how natural it felt to embrace John. Brian had never been one to go around showing physical affection to the people around him, but throwing his arms around John felt like coming home; it felt warm and familiar, especially when John doubted not to pull him closer to him and hug him back.

‘So I take it you like the gift?’ John whispered in his ear when he had positioned himself against Brian’s chest as comfortably as the current situation allowed him.

‘I _love_ it,’ Brian whispered back. ‘I don’t know how to thank you for it.’

‘You don’t need to,’ John ensured him, and, when he sensed that Brian wanted to protest against this order, he pressed his friend closer against him to silence him for the moment. Brian understood what he meant by this, and decided not to press on and urge John to come up with a way to pay him back for the incredible favour he had done him; not right now, at any rate. Right now was reserved for holding on to each other as if it was the last time they would ever see each other.

They stayed in their silent embrace for a moment Brian could not judge time-wise; it might have been five seconds or it might have been fifty. All he knew was that they were eventually drawn apart by Freddie, who did not seem to know what to do now that he was not the centre of attention.

‘Alright, guys, that’s been enough affection for now. You can pick it up again later in private to do whatever you like,’ Freddie grinned, and Brian felt his cheek turning hot against John’s shoulder. He wanted to move away from John, but his friend did not let go of him so easily; not before having patted him on the back and having held him a little tighter before letting go of him, that was.

‘Do whatever you like after dinner. I first want to hear some music!’ Freddie demanded and he clapped in his hands excitedly, and Brian and John begrudgingly let go of each other.

‘What do you generally play, Brian? The Beatles? Rolling Stones? Have you heard the latest album of The Who that came out like a month ago? Oh no, wait! Can you play Jimi Hendrix? I love Jimi Hendrix!’ Freddie rattled on, not at all seeming to see that John and Brian were not at all paying attention to him - or at least, that Brian was not hearing a word he was saying. Because when he had pulled back and his eyes had met John’s, Brian finally came to realise something he had known all along deep, deep inside, since the day he had first laid his eyes upon John, but something he had never fully recognised or understood until this very moment.

He was in love.

 

 


	9. Part Nine

The rain was pouring down from the sky in buckets, clattering against the windows of the dorm room loudly enough to force its inhabitants to raise their voice if they wanted to hear each other. With Roger’s voice still being strong after his recent drug-related illness, Brian’s incapability of raising his voice if his life depended upon it, and John’s usual tendency to not speak at all, they had soon wordlessly settled that perhaps plain talking was not the best activity to engage in at the moment. Luckily, with the arrival of Brian’s guitar the other day, the four of them had enough to keep them busy without needing to talk all too much - even though Freddie still seemed to insist on yelling over the sound of the pouring rain with all his might.

Sitting at the table in the middle of the room with the remains of the outdated Eastern-German Mensch-ärgere-dich-nicht game still in front of him was Freddie, who insisted on all of them coming together to see which songs they could play now that net to Roger’s improvised drums and his own singing, they had managed to lay their hands on an actual electric guitar and someone who could play it. He had gotten as far as having everyone awake at the same time, but Brian had been the only one willing to leave his bed and sit at the opposite side of the table. Roger said he felt nauseous and had not been persuadable to do more than sit upright in his bed with an improvised drum stick in each hand, and John was lying in bed on top of the sheets and blankets. They had not managed to convince him to get up, but Brian had a feeling the boy was listening to everything they said and did - and especially to all _he_ said and did. Whereas normally John would be lying either on his back staring at the ceiling, or on his front with his head buried in his pillow to block everyone around him, he at the moment was lying on his side and seemed to be watching the scene unfolding around the table, and mainly as it was unfolding at Brian’s side. Brian felt the eyes of his friend glued on him, and whenever he turned slightly to the side to glance back at John, he noticed how the boy pretended not to have been looking by facing away. Brian knew better than that, though, for the eyes would instantly return to focus on him the moment he looked at either his guitar or at Freddie again. Especially the latter of the two was currently asking for a lot of attention.

‘Alright, darlings,’ Freddie said as he clapped in his hands to attract the focus of as many people that were willing to listen to him - which at the moment only turned out to be Brian. ‘So what I was thinking of is that we’ll play some songs of the latest album of The Who. Have you heard the album?’

‘I have,’ Roger piped up from the other side of the room, and Freddie, looking disturbed for a moment, gave Brian and eye roll before turning to his partner.

‘Yes, darling, I know. I was there _with you_ when the entire album was played on the radio,’ he answered with more than a little touch of sass, making Brian snicker.

‘I’ve heard the album, yes,’ Brian said before the couple could retreat into bickering over who had been addressing whom. ‘I actually think Who’s Next was the last album I bought before I was… you know, brought here,’ he said, his voice dropping when he neared the end of this sentence.

The smile momentarily faded from Freddie’s face when he noticed how Brian looked away, and he quickly said: ‘If it brings back bad memories, we’ll just pick another album. We always have other albums to pick from. There’s always _Hunky Dory_ from David Bowie, but that’s a bit obscure, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. And _Let It Bleed_ from the Rolling Stones. That one’s been around for a few years by now. I heard they’re working on a new album, but I don’t know when that’ll be due…’

Freddie rattled on incoherently for a bit longer, but Brian decided to save him from his own monologue by telling him: ‘I don’t mind, really. _Who’s Next_ is a good album with great guitarwork. I’m sure we can play some of it.’

Freddie seemed to cheer up again when he heard this. ‘Well, _Who’s Next_ it is then! So there’s of course _Bargain_ , but that’s perhaps a bit loud to play in here if we don’t want the entire community come banging at our door. _Love Ain’t For Keeping_ might be a better song to play here, and the guitar parts of it are great, but it doesn’t really fit my voice, to be honest… And then there’s this other song that’s a pretty big deal at the moment. What’s it called again, dear?’ Freddie asked as he turned around to face his boyfriend, who was sitting a metre or two behind him on his bed and was listening to the conversation between Freddie and Brian with about half an ear.

‘Sorry? What song?’ he asked dazedly.

‘You know the one that’s on the radio all the time. It has a pretty long into, and it starts with this organ kind of thing…?

While the couple was trying to figure out between the two of them which hit song Freddie was referring to, Brian used the opportunity to slightly turn around and have a look at John. The boy - as he had done a handful of times before - averted his eyes and pretended that he had not been glancing at him, but, probably sensing that Brian knew better than that, he soon looked up to face his friend. Still lying on his side with his head propped up on one hand, he gave Brian a bit of a shy smile, and Brian hoped he did not look all to awkward and blushy when he returned the favour. He wished he would not look like a giggling schoolgirl whenever John and he shared a moment like this, but he could not help himself. There was something about John, about his quietness and reticence that he seemed to put aside whenever he was with Brian (or when they found themselves in a situation like this) that made Brian incapable of keeping his studied composure. The second he saw a hint of a smile break through on those pale pink lips, or when he found those eyes fixed on him, Brian felt his cheeks turning red and his knees starting to feel shaky. It was as if someone had released butterflies in his stomach - and not just a handful, but an entire herd of them that were furiously fluttering around inside of him. He liked John - more than that, he admired him and all the things he said and did to the point where he could not stop thinking about him for most of the day. He was drawn to him, and he was sure that if it had not been for the increasingly loud voices of Freddie and Roger bringing him back to the conversation, he would have stared at John for a lot longer than just the ten seconds he had done.

‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking of,’ Roger said, sounding defensive rather than apologetic by now.

‘Of course you do!’ Freddie cried. ‘It goes something like… Come on, what was the refrain again? Something like ‘don’t cry, don’t raise your eyes, it’s only teenage wasteland’… Teenage wasteland!’ He exclaimed while clapping in his hands, happy as a child who had just been given a box of Smarties now that he had remembered the song.

‘Oh! You mean _Baba O’Riley_!’ Roger corrected him, the song suddenly coming down on him, too.

‘ _Baba O’Riley_?’ Freddie looked sceptic.

‘That’s the title,’ Roger explained. ‘It’s not _Teenage Wasteland_ , but _Baba O’Riley_. Has something to do with a dude Pete Townshend called the song after. They said that on the radio, too.’

Freddie looked pensive for a moment, but when he could not seem to remember having heard this, he simply shrugged it off. ‘Whatever. We’ll just call it _Teenage Wasteland_.’

‘Roger Daltrey would turn around in his grave if he heard you call it that,’ Roger warned.

‘He’s not even dead yet!’ Freddie brought up.

‘Imagine!’ Roger said, as if he had proven his point even more by now. Freddie, on the other hand, turned back to Brian again and rolled his eyes as if to tell him to just leave Roger be.

‘Anyway, this _Teenage Wasteland_ song. Do you know it?’ Freddie asked Brian, who redirected his eyes from John’s direction - where they had wandered off to again - towards his other friend.

‘Yes, I know it,’ Brian said, avoiding the title of the song as to make sure Roger and Freddie would let the topic rest. ‘But I’m not too sure if it’s the ideal song to play here, with the organ intro and all. Certainly for an electric guitar I think we’d better play something like… you know, something like Won’t Get Fooled Again or so,’ Brian proposed shyly. He remained ever-cautious with opposing anyone here, even if it was only about a small matter like which song to play. The last thing he wanted to do was rub someone the wrong way, but luckily for him, Freddie was all in favour of the plan he proposed.

‘God, I totally forgot that song! But that’s a much better idea. Let me just note some stuff down.’ Freddie got up from the chair and paced over to his bed, where he pulled a pen from out of the drawer of the nightstand. He looked around himself, and Brian realised he must be looking for some paper to write on. Paper supplies were scarce at Queen Mary’s and only soft, thin pages like those out of scratch-pads had been distributed of late, as to minimise the risk of people voluntarily cutting themselves on paper.

‘No paper left?’ Brian asked, and Freddie nodded as he got down at the table again. ‘I have a diary I can tear some pages out of,’ Brian proposed as an option. He was already halfway to pulling the guitar strap over his neck and putting the precious instrument aside for a moment so he could get up and fetch his diary, but with the motion of his hand Freddie prevented him.

‘You shouldn’t ruin your diary, dear. This thing will do,’ he said while pulling the German-Russian-Polish instruction page for Mensch-ärgere-dich-nicht out of the game box, which he smoothed out before he started scribbling on it.

Brian, with one cocked eyebrow, asked him: ‘Are you sure that works? There’s hardly any space left with all those instructions on that page.’

‘No, this’ll do perfectly, dear,’ Freddie let him know while bending a bit closer to the paper and crossed with the tip of the pen over the surface of the paper. ‘I just wish I could use my pencils.’

‘Why weren’t pencils allowed in here again?’ Brian asked. He was pretty sure he had heard the dumb story of why yet another everyday tool had been prohibited at Queen Mary’s, but he could not remember it at the moment.

‘Because you need a sharpener to use them, and sharpeners were forbidden after someone tried to slice off the top of someone else’s finger with it,’ Freddie reminded him, sounding perfectly unsurprised while, after a flick of his tongue to the pencil tip, the thing started working faintly again. Brian sighed inwardly - there was not a single item that could fit within the palm of the hand that someone at this place had not tried to turn into a murder weapon yet. It was tiring to slowly be deprived of literally everything around you, but, knowing there was nothing he could do about it to change it anyway, he decided not to dwell on it for too long.

Instead, Brian canted his head a bit as to be able to see what Freddie was writing on the paper that was lying upside down from him. He could decipher the title of the song, a few words of lyrics Freddie attached to it, but was lost when Freddie drew about four or five vertical lines with small distance between each other, and started filling them in with unknown symbols. Freddie did not comment on what it was he was doing, so Brian sought refuge in something else to keep him busy at the moment - which happened to be, for at least the tenth time that day, the feeling that John was staring at him. He turned around, saw John diverting his gaze to the wall in front of him, and Brian turned back to the paper with a bit of an awkward smile on his face. He did not know how to feel about John looking at him and looking away from him time after time. Of course, getting attention from John was something he was all for, and when John took the time and effort to smile at him like he had done the time before, he was over the moon. But this cat-and-mouse-game they seemed to be falling into again was getting on his nerves a bit by now, so he told himself not to pay attention to his crush anymore for now and instead focus on the lines and symbols Freddie had drawn out and was showing him right now.

‘So, this should be just about it,’ Freddie declared as he flipped the paper over to Brian, who took a moment of time to study it. ‘I don’t remember all of the lyrics of the first couplet, to be honest,’ he said, using the pen he was still holding in hand to point at the gaps in the lines he had written in between the instructions. ‘Maybe you can have a look at them.’

‘I will,’ Brian promised, but first, he had to get a somewhat more pressing matter out of the way. ‘Are those music scales?’ he asked with a frown on his forehead.

‘Supposedly,’ Freddie said, which only raised more questions for Brian.

‘What does that mean?’ Brian asked softly. He knew that he - with no schooled musical skills and having learned everything he knew either from his father or from books borrowed from the library - could not read music notes, so it came as a relief to him that Freddie admitted he could not either.

‘That means that I never studied sheet music and that I just do whatever I hope will work,’ Freddie giggled, adding a last few dashes to the already illegible scales.

‘Professionalism at its best here in Room 41,’ Roger remarked just when Freddie and Brian had forgotten about his presence altogether. Brian could hardly tell Roger he was wrong, but Freddie - as usual - begged to differ.

‘Excuse you? We _are_ professionals. We know how to play without these rubbish music scales,’ Freddie told him while drawing a cross through the scales and notes to wipe them out as if they had never even existed.

‘Then why were you drawing them?’ Roger asked him.

‘Because!’ Freddie replied indignantly, and, when Roger continued to stare at him as if he expected a more solid answer than this, he added: ‘Because it makes us look more professional!’

‘Not if you draw them so badly that Brian has to ask what they are!’

Brian wanted to say that the reason he had asked was not solely because the music scales à la Freddie looked more irregular than a drawing his three year old self would have made, but that part of him asking had been because he could not read notes at all. He did not get a chance, though, because before he could open his mouth, Freddie had given a sassy reply again. He decided he would rather focus on the faint chuckle he heard coming from behind him, and turned around to find John still lying in bed in the same propped up position that allowed him to look at Brian. When their eyes met the exact moment Roger reminded his partner he had never been able to read a single note in his entire life and Freddie urged him to take that back, John snickered again, and, with his eyes closed, shook his head in disbelief. Brian smiled at his reaction - or rather, he wished he would have smiled, but to his embarrassment it turned out more like a giggle than a smile. He hoped John had not heard over the sound of Freddie raising his voice again, at which John pulled a face and covered one of his ears with his hand. Brian similarly pulled at the shell of his ear as to check if it was still working once Freddie had finished shouting, which sent John into an adorable giggle that released a hundred thousand butterflies in Brian’s stomach.

Brian decided to focus on the conversation he had been having again before the couple would find out John and he had been making fun of them, but there turned out to be little to talk of now that his friends were trying to prove each other wrong as to the knowledge of music notes each of them possessed.

‘Why, then you make them if you’re so good at them!’ Freddie proposed loudly.

‘I thought you just said you guys didn’t need them anyway,’ Roger reminded him.

Brian did not feel to mingling. He had told himself he was not going to mix into whatever silly discussions Freddie and Roger were going to have when, during one of the first days here, John had told him that the pair of them show their affection to each other by fighting like cats and dogs. However, the whole music notes project was growing out of hand by now, and all Brian wanted to do, all he had come out of bed for, dressed up for, and had sit down for, was simply to play music - which was not going to happen if his roommates would not get over themselves anywhere soon. He had no idea how he was going to stop them, but when he remembered that he had somehow managed to make Drew back off, Brian thought he should be able to get the upper hand of a sick drug addict currently facing withdrawal symptoms and an anorexia patient so weakened he could hardly stand up from his seat without having to cling onto to the table for dear life, which gave him courage enough to at least raise his voice.

‘Alright, alright, that’s enough for now,’ Brian said as loudly and sternly as he could, which seemed to work - or, that was, Freddie and Roger fell silent for a moment. Clutching his guitar a bit closer to his body, Brian told them: ‘I never use music notes and I’m sure we can do without. Let’s finish up those lyrics so you know what to sing, then I’ll play the rhythm and you kick in. How does that sound?’ Brian said, aiming at Freddie specifically. His fellow musician nodded enthusiastically, but it turned out that this was not so much for his proposal, but because he felt that Brian’s words supported his own case rather than that of Roger.

‘I told you, Roger,’ Freddie said smugly as he turned around again. ‘We don’t even need scales-’

‘Guys…’ Brian sighed, starting to feel a bit hopeless by now that they would ever get to the part of playing music together now that Freddie lashed out at Roger again, who whined something back in response. Brian was almost as far as to simply stand up and sit back down on his bed to play on his own when suddenly help came from an unexpected source.

‘Stop sulking and listen to Brian.’

For the first time since Brian turned around to look at john, John was not looking at him specifically, but his glance rested more between Freddie and Roger. After all, it had been these two who had pushed their luck too far with their endless quarrelling over nothing. There was silence for a moment, which Brian was grateful for; finally there was a moment he could recover from the bickering of his roommates and take a breath. When this moment had passed, he turned his eyes back to John, and whispered a wordless ‘thank you’ at his crush, feeling blessed to know that at least John had his back in a matter like this.

As happy as Brian was that John was helping him out, so displeased were the ones against whom John’s comment had been aimed.

‘Gee! John talks!’ Freddie snapped back as sassily as he could, but it sounded like he knew himself that he just said this because he had no other witty reply ready to serve John with.

‘You know I see no other option than to open my mouth when you two act like spoiled brats,’ John reproved them, and especially Freddie seemed to give in to his defeat now. ‘Now finish up those lyrics and start playing before I’ll help Brian find someone else to jam with.’

‘It’s not jamming when you only have someone adding vocals to your guitar playing,’ Freddie muttered, but one angry glance from John was enough to shut him up permanently. With a displeased expression on his face he sat down next to Brian, who could not wash the smile away from his face now that John had not only told Freddie how things were going to be in his favour, but had also just given him a wink to assure him he was on his side. Brian secretly hoped the wink was more than just that, since it was coming from someone as restrained and thrifty with signs of approval and affection as John, but told himself to get this idea out of his head before it would nestle itself and settle down and torture him even more whenever John and he shared a look or a word between the two of them.

Pushing all of his thoughts concerning his crush out of his head but still feeling whose eyes fixed on his back, Brian, picking up the pen Freddie had put down on the table when his discussion with Roger had started, leant closer to the paper and filled in as many of the words of the couplet he could remember. He managed to fill in a considerable amount of gaps, and the ones that were still left blank when Freddie and he had gone over the text like for line, they decided to fill up with whatever they thought was fitting - an activity that sometimes pulled out the most serious alternatives to the real lyrics, and other times had them laughing with the stupid options they came up with. Roger soon joined in on them, and Brian could hear John either chuckle or quietly agree with the serious and not-so-serious things he brought in more than to all that Freddie and Roger brought in together.

By the time they had managed to at least pull the first couplet and the refrain together, Brian’s fingers were aching to play. Consequently, when Freddie said it was time to pull out the instruments - that was, Roger’s improvised drum sticks, his own singing voice, and Brian’s guitar - Brian was already halfway through tuning his guitar and warming up his fingers. While Freddie ran over the lyrics a few times and Roger restlessly tapped his drumsticks against the wooden frame of their bed, Brian started playing the rhythm of the song as he remembered it. Freddie corrected him where he could, which he gladly used to show Roger that they needed no music notes to communicate their wishes in music. Then finally, when Freddie had done what he called voice exercises (and what Roger called squealing pig noises) they could start off.

From the moment he started playing the guitar tune of _Won’t Get Fooled Again_ for real instead of for warm up, Brian was completely absorbed in his own guitarwork, the sound he produced, the way the guitar strings felt against his fingers, his own task within the music session. He heard Freddie falling in and could faintly make out the rhythm of Roger’s drum sticks, but he both could not and did not want to allow himself to pay too much attention to it. All he focussed on was on how he could make most out of his own guitar skills - for the only thing he could think about right now was about making a good impression on John. It was not just that he knew John was listening to him and watching his every movement, but also the fact that the guitar had been a present from John. John had of course already heard him play some tunes the evening before, but this would be the first time he would really see Brian in action. The idea of messing things up and disappointing John after having spent God knew how many months’ worth of points or whatever way the system worked on a guitar for him, made Brian feel as if his intestines were being turned inside out. He had to perform well and give it all he got.

Much to his frustration, however, once they were playing properly, Brian noticed he did not play as smooth as he would have wished for. He knew it was probably just the nerves of having his crush, who simultaneously was the one who had enabled him to play his favourite instrument again, listening to him and watching him intently from some place behind him Brian could not see while playing. He did not know if it was a good or a bad thing that he could not see John’s possibly judging eyes focussed on him as he was playing, but what he did know was that as it was right now, with his hands clammed with sweat and his fingers shaky against the guitar strings, was not the ideal situation. He wished he could stretch out his fingers and have a glass of water and perhaps a bit less fear of failing in front of his crush, but unfortunately for him, this seemed not to be part of the scheme of things. While at first it seemed to take _ages_ for Freddie to join his vocals to the tunes of the guitar, he kept cutting himself off because he was not satisfied with his voice, while at the same time gestured to Brian he had to keep going while he tried to recover himself. It was only after this had continued try after try after try that Freddie properly picked up the rhythm, and Brian could allow his cramped fingers to work on the tune of the refrain instead of the couplet he by now wished he would never have to play again.

Unfortunately for him, however, just when he was starting to loosen up and play better, Freddie cut himself off in the middle of the sentence and gestured for everyone to stop playing and singing.

‘What’s the matter?’ Brian asked, sincerely not having paid enough attention to anyone around him but John’s gazing stare to know what had been happening.

‘Couldn’t you hear? The vocals were fucked up,’ Roger said plainly, which his partner corrected.

‘It’s just that my voice’s a bit rough today,’ Freddie said as he cleared his throat a couple of times, interspersed with attempts at singing, but they soon turned out to bring him nowhere better than where he had been during their playing.

‘Only today?’ Your voice has been sounding like an amplified sheep since the day I met you,’ Roger grinned maliciously, and Freddie, who noticed the aspect of provocation in his voice, was quick to serve him with a similarly cruel reply.

‘Why, and that’s you talking! You sound like a dog whistle.’

‘That’s not what you said last night,’ Roger said with a smirk, which had Brian wondering what on earth he had to say to make his roommates behave again _this_ time.

‘God, you’re insufferable!’ Freddie said, but the laugh that followed when he moved over to playfully slap his boyfriend on the lower leg indicated that he was not serious about his comment. ‘I just need to warm my voice first, okay? I haven’t sung in ages.’

‘Then what do you call your wailing in the shower each morning?’ Roger asked coyly, head tilted slightly to the side. Freddie, however, gave an answer that was a lot less innocent than the question he had been asked was.

‘The noise I’m making when I’ve locked myself inside a private shower cabin has a different source than me practicing my singing voice, and you _know_ that.’

‘Alright, that’s enough for now,’ Brian interrupted the conversation he saw unfolding in front of him. Even though Freddie and Roger resorted to sexually explicit remarks multiple times a day and John and he were often the witness of these, he had not gotten used to them yet, and feared that this also was not something he was going to do anywhere soon. ‘Let’s pick it up again where we left it.’

‘Where I left right now or this morning?’ Freddie asked saucily, and Brian wondered why he still even tried. Keeping up with people was really, really testing his patience and self-confidence at times, but he was glad to hear that once again, John had his back.

‘None of us wish to hear the sound of you jerking off to the image of Nolan wearing nothing but a towel, Bulsara,’ John said sharply and so brutally honestly that it made Roger cover his mouth with his hand and had Brian biting down his bottom lip to restrain himself from making any sort of sound that would indicate his surprise to hearing someone as quiet as John saying this.

‘I don’t think about Nolan!’ Freddie objected as soon as he had pulled himself together. ‘Why do yo-’

‘-So I suggest you start off where you left it. I take my head off to the new constitution or so,’ John somewhat incorrectly quoted Freddie’s lines. Freddie looked like he wanted to complain, but seemed to think better of it when John gave him an I’m-not-messing-around-glance before looking away from Freddie and give Brian a careful smile as to encourage him to get things going.

Brian, once again with a thankful nod towards his guardian angel on earth, started playing the tune of the refrain before anyone else could object again, and he knew for a fact that John was grinning from ear to ear when he elevated the sound of his guitar to the level where Freddie’s attempt at complaining could not be heard. Roger enthusiastically started adding whatever one wanted to call his drum act to the guitar, but Freddie did not give in so easily - that was, not before he had tried to drag John into playing with them. Brian figured that Freddie knew just as well as all of them did that if John had wanted to join them, he would have told them so by now. On top of that, they had literally all heard John say the day before he did not play a single note on guitar, and given that he hardly ever spoke a word in public, it would seem highly unlikely to Brian that John sang.

‘Don’t you want to play with us?’ Freddie asked coyly on top of the sound of Brian’s guitar riff, but John brushed it off without going into the slyness of the voice Freddie was using at him.

‘I can’t play. I can’t play a guitar and I don’t sing,’ he explained shortly.

‘Have you ever tried?’ Freddie suggested all sweetly.

‘I have,’ John said, implicating that he had attempted it - which Brian doubted, in all honesty - but had given up on it again. At any rate, he did not waste more than two words on his refusal to join them, which seemed to annoy Freddie.

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t regret having a go singing with me. We can pick an easier song if this one’s too difficult for you,’ Freddie said bittersweetly, but John was perfectly immune to this and had his reply ready at hand.

‘I think one amplified sheep and one dog whistle must be enough for one music act,’ John told him. ‘Are you going to sing or shall I go out to find Brian a new singer after all?’

Not wanting to accept his loss and simultaneously unable to come up with any gotcha-replies, Freddie turned away from John, picked up the paper in front of him again, and, after having cleared his throat at least four times, he joined in with the music again. Brian by now was less nervous and less focussed on how he was coming across to John - partly because he knew John seemed to be on his side anyway, and because a bit of playing had made him pick things up again. It had of course been a while since he had seriously played the guitar - he had not seen one in weeks since his arrival at Queen Mary’s, and the last months at home he also had not managed to do more than lie on his bed with his Red Special and pluck at the strings for a bit. Yet playing guitar was like cycling, as he had heard his father say once; once you learned how to do it, you would never lose your skills.

Now that he could thus focus better on the music they were producing together instead of the sound that was coming out of his own guitar, Brian gave himself the opportunity to focus on his fellow bandmates, if one could call them that. Roger was enthusiastic enough about hitting several surfaces of wood and stone, including the wall and the wooden bed frame. He seemed to have the spirit, it seemed to Brian, but he lacked the tools for it. As to Freddie, he seemed to have a wide vocal range, but did not always hit the correct notes at the correct time. He sounded like he had a great deal of potential, and he certainly went all for it now that he was focussing on singing and not on getting back at his roommate; Brian suspected that with the right training and persistence, they would have a very good singer at their fingertips.

When after about five minutes (excluding a guitar solo he pulled off once Freddie had finished singing the last lines they remembered to be part of the song) Brian laid down his instrument, Brian found the two other artists and himself facing each other, waiting for the other ones to get the conversation going.

Not to his surprise, it was Freddie who eventually got the ball rolling. ‘That was pretty okay, I’d say,’ he said, sounding pleasantly surprised by what they had pulled off together. ‘Certainly for a first time and us not being accustomed to playing together, I think we did fine.’

‘Once you picked it up with the couplet, things went pretty well indeed,’ Roger agreed on the matter with his partner for what seemed like the first time that day. He glanced at Brian, who nodded feverishly in response. There still were a lot of things to work on - both instrument-wise, technique-wise, and ability-wise, for all three of them, but he could certainly see them playing together more often from now on. Despite the bickering over music notes and moaning in the shower, he enjoyed playing with this team, and having John engaging with the activity - even if it was just a minimum of engagement - was something he was always all for.

‘I agree. We should do this more often,’ Brian commented.

‘And what do you think, John?’ Freddie asked - this time not maliciously any longer, but genuinely aiming to include John in the discussion. As he had been watching and listening the entire time, John could give valuable insights as to how all factors came together and how they adapted to each other musically. Unfortunately for Freddie and Roger, though, it seemed like John had been focussing on the owner of the guitar he had ordered only.

‘I think Brian sounded very good indeed. Very brilliant guitar work,’ John said pensively with slow yet insistent nodding. Freddie and Roger faced each other upon hearing that John commented on Brian only, and Brian had to avert his eyes for a moment, glowing both with shame and with pride that John singled him out to praise his guitar playing.

‘I wasn’t talking of Brian on his own, dear,’ Freddie brought up to John, which seemed to bring his roommate out of his bubble for one split second.

‘Oh,’ John commented, obviously a bit confused while his brain spun for an answer which included all musicians - but which was not a bit more pleasing to Freddie. ‘In which case, very well. Brian was keeping everyone together very well. He really forms a smooth balance between everyone involved.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Freddie asked with one raised eyebrow; the focus on Brian and lack of comments on the rest of the cooperation obviously bothered him, and Brian could hardly tell him he was wrong. It was indeed a bit awkward to only have John praising him, and not mention the others at all - and it got even more awkward for that matter when John started pointing out the flaws of everyone apart from Brian.

‘What I said. Brian keeps everyone together pretty well,’ John said firmly. When three pairs of eyes stared at him to wordlessly ask for explanation, he coughed and firmly said: ‘See, Roger probably has the skills but I can hardly hear him playing the wall and the foot end of the bed, so we’ll need some better drumming kit to really bring him into the act. And your voice while singing just kind of goes all over the place, which is a bit problematic for the consistency of the song.’ John spoke as a valid music critic, but Freddie did not care for one bit of what he said the moment his singing voice was critiqued.

‘Why, thank you!’ Freddie exclaimed. ‘So first I sound like an amplified sheep, and now my voice is all over the place?’ he looked at John with serious, pervasive eyes, but John did not give in one inch.

‘What? It’s true,’ he defended himself calmly with a shrug of his shoulders, which only seemed to increase Freddie’s frustration.

‘Why are you all after me today?’ Freddie cried. ‘I can sing and you know it!’ Freddie turned to Roger for help, but when his partner remained quiet, he reached out to his only other possible aid instead. ‘Brian, help me!’ he demanded.

Brian, who had wandered off to tuning his guitar strings the second the arguing over voices and instruments had begun, looked up from his task a bit puzzled when he heard his name being called out. He saw Freddie staring at him intently, as if he was his last hope of survival, and he chose his words carefully before he spoke.

‘Well, you know… What John probably means is that your voice is not trained yet,’ Brian calmly started off. ‘You can clearly hear you can sing, and you have talent, but you have never been formally trained, so your voice can be a bit… it has some rough edges when you have to hit high notes and the like, you see?’ Brian reasoned, and when he looked up to see a pair of eyes that no longer looked helpless, angry, or insulted, he knew he was on the right track. ‘Listen, we’re only just starting out. We’re just some amateur musicians enjoying playing together. We have passion, we have a heart for music, we know what we want, but we don’t have the training and the experience. None of us are perfect yet, but if we practice and believe in what we do, I’m sure we’ll get closer to that point every day,’ Brian concluded.

It was only when he had finished his last sentence that Brian realised he had pulled of half an inauguration speech, and that the musicians around him were staring at him rather stupidly. He no longer knew what to say; it was as if all his eloquence had left his body just as swiftly as it had arrived, and Brian was positive that if it had not been for John, the silence in Room 41 easily could have lasted minutes.

‘Very beautifully spoken,’ John said - which, even after all the direct and indirect compliments he had made to praise Brian’s guitar work, was the most meaningful comment Brian had received that day. He looked at John a bit shyly, and for the first time John directly looked back at him he was not met with a soothing smile or some kind, but with an intense gaze into his eyes instead. Eyes that said they supported him, they had his back, they would catch him if he would fall; eyes that explained all that John was willing to do for him but which he could not say to him in words.

It was Freddie who, oh so fittingly, reminded them of John’s general inability to speak comfortably most of the time. ‘And that’s said by someone who dislikes talking,’ Freddie laughed to let the rest of them know he was just making a joke, but even though Brian was sure John must have understood this, he did not treat it as a joke but as a serious misinformed observation he needed to put straight.

‘I don’t like to speak myself. That doesn’t mean I don’t like to listen to people who have valuable things to say,’ John said somewhat blankly, his eyes wandering back from Freddie to Brian. They were dark and deep and his face had the same intense expression on it that he had worn ever since he had told Brian his speech had been marvellous. Looking back into those eyes was something Brian hardly dared to do, but he soon found he could not pull away, especially not when John added the meaningful words: ‘And I think I’ve found such a person in Brian.’

# # #

The days continued to be dark and rainy, and though Brian missed spending time with John outside, he found that making music made him feel almost just as close to his crush as actually being alone with him did. Practically every spare minute they had between the four of them was spent in music some way; either they would be trying to remember songs’ lyrics and rhythms, or sneak into the activity room when not too many people were around to lay their claim on the radio for inspiration, or they would be practicing in their room. It was generally Freddie who gave directions as to what they were going to play and how they were going to go around doing this, in which he was countered by Roger - who wanted his opinion to be heard - nine out of ten times. In the meantime John would be watching Brian as he leisurely strummed his guitar, until John would notice that Brian was getting fed up with the quarrelling in the background and was ready for some action. He would then, with a few sharp but effective words, call everyone to order, after which Brian would accompany them into a song into which everyone would join. They would jam on for minutes and minutes while John sat and listened (or lay down and listened, for that matter), pretending to pay attention to all of them while Brian - by the looks he flashed, the rhythms he hummed along, and the comments he would provide afterwards - knew he was focussed on him solely.

John and Brian did have their moments alone sometimes, such as when Freddie decided to go to the gym room and dragged Roger along with him against his will, in which they often turned to each other to talk of matters uninterrupted by the rest of the cruel. They would talk of how they were holding out at the clinic, if Brian still felt guilty about Jimmy, and if John was still laying off his self-harming practices. They would talk of the matters of the day - such as fights that had occurred in the dining room and people having been placed into isolation for their destructive behaviour, or speculate about changes that had been made at Queen Mary’s no one had an official explanation for. One of the matters that kept them busy most - after the removal of the coffee and tea machine from the canteen for whatever reason - was the disappearance of Ariel, one of their group leaders. Jasper had commented on her not being present only by saying she was ill, but this all-too-general explanation was not believed by many. She had not showed her face at the clinic for a week, and the wildest stories were going down. Brian and John did not believe her having been kidnapped by a jealous ex-boyfriend, but the rumours of the crying and yelling of abuse at someone on her last day while a certain guy Brian did not know the name of had been carried off to the isolation cells coming from her having been sexually assaulted by said guy, was a plausible backstory. The only thing that did not fit into this picture was that no one had seen police around - but then again, neither had police investigated the death of Jimmy. If Queen Mary’s had managed to hush up a case of suicide by bullying or possible murder, then certainly swiping a sexual assault case under the rug should not be too hard for them.

Of course, Brian and John were not always in the mood to speak of such heavy matters. Sometimes they would simply talk of what had been for breakfast that morning, what kind of nonsense questions and answers they had heard during group therapy, or suggest little changes (such as bringing back the coffee and tea machine and fixing some of the towel hooks in the shower) that would make life a bit easier at this mental prison place. In yet other moments they did not care to speak at all. They could also just be quiet and simply enjoy each other’s company while reading a book or staring at their surroundings and still be as satisfied as one could be in the situation they were finding themselves in. Even though they did not talk in such moments, Brian still felt as connected to John as when they would.

Most of the times Brian - whether it be in moments they were with the four of them or when he was alone with John, whether they were talking of this place or music or nothing at all - could feel perfectly normal around John, and see him as the friend he had been looking for for a long time. At other moments, however, it was as if the realisation that he liked John as more than just a friend hit him like a freight train, and he felt like he had to lie down and close his eyes and think of legislation or the daily evening news just in order to get the image of John that made his knees grow weak out of his head. He would be going about his day with John and the rest of the limited amount of people he was in touch with at Queen Mary’s just as usual, and then suddenly, when he himself least expected it, something about John would totally make him lose all composure, all concentration, all he normally knew himself to stand for. It could happen anywhere and anyplace, and for the silliest, smallest reasons - not to say that it often were the silliest and smallest reasons that made him feel head over heels for John.

It could be the way he crouched down to the floor to tie his shoelaces, or the way he would thank the meal servers at the canteen for filling his plate with whatever it was they were served that day. It would be the way his hair looked when he just came out of the shower, or how he handed over his medicine forms at the apothecary in the morning. It was the way he would walk with his hands in his pockets on a cold day in the gardens, and how he wiped his hands off on the sides of his trousers whenever the towel distributor in the bathroom had either been raided or demolished again. It was the way he kept his watchful eyes on Freddie when he wouldn’t eat, the way he would remind Roger to take his showers and brush his teeth even though he did not feel like it, and most of all, it was the way he looked at Brian. That usually rigid or empty stare he would normally carry around would soften up the moment he laid his eyes on Brian; be it when he asked for some toothpaste to borrow at seven o’clock in the morning at the washstand, when they looked at each other to avoid being picked on by Jasper during group sessions, while talking to each other in their room, on the swings, in the cave John no longer called ‘his cave’ but ‘their cave’, or when Brian glanced up from the book he was reading to find John looking into his direction. Regardless of what the situation was or where they were, Brian was sure to be met with that soft expression of John’s eyes, and some moments this look hit him harder than other times. Sometimes it made him feel safe, understood, no longer alone, as if he had a friend, finally a friend he had been looking for for so long; and other times it made his stomach turn upside down and his knees turn into spaghetti because he had never fallen for anyone as deeply as he had for John - if he had ever been in love at all before he had laid his eyes on John.

Despite the eternal daydreams and inconvenient blushing at times, Brian felt that he was managing to keep his crush on John a perfect secret so far. He had been very careful. He did not know what people around this place would think of him if they found out he was in love with John, and in the broader sense of the world, was attracted to men. He had a feeling some patients around the place would not be as tolerant or accepting towards gay people. He had heard people calling Roger, and mainly Freddie, names at times that he did not wish to repeat; and the ‘accidental’ stomps on the stairways, sticking out feet in the canteen for either of the pair to trip over. The people leaving the bathroom the moment they saw Freddie or Roger walking in had also not escaped Brian’s notice.

He liked to believe that staff at this place was more tolerant, but he was not too sure of this, either. He knew that psychologists, psychiatrists, and mentors at this place had to be as impartial and neutral as possible and were not technically allowed to judge people for their mental illness - but that was exactly the point here. On his first day his mentor Nolan had disclosed that some people at Queen Mary’s had been sent here for what they called a ‘gender identity disorder’. If psychiatrists at this place viewed being transgender as a mental disorder, one badly enough to lock someone up in a mental hospital, then why would they feel any different about someone being gay, being attracted to the same gender, or whatever one would call it?

That was another point he was not yet sure about - what his falling in love with his male friend said about his sexuality. Before John Brian had never really thought of his sexuality; the only thing he had been pondering about really was that he had never been in love with anyone. Surely, he saw attractive people out in the streets and at school, had even been on a few dates with this girl called Amy back when he was sixteen, and had felt drawn somehow to Jake, a guy who had been in year two of astrophysics back when he had been at university. He had pushed this away at the time, thinking he was merely jealous of Jake’s outstanding intelligence and good looks, and refused to believe he could possibly in love with a man. Looking back at it, he might not really have been in love with Jake indeed, it might have been this weird sort of half-crush - but there was no denying he was in love with John, and Brian was unsure what this said about his identity. He had been attracted to girls before, but had that attraction been strong enough to call it love? Was he not just gay after all? But if he was, had he then be fooling himself when he had written (though never dispatched) those love letters to Amy, which had felt so sincere at the time? What did his attraction to John make him in the grand scheme of things?

Last of all, Brian did not want to show his infatuation for John because he wanted to be seen as _normal_ for once in his lifetime - as normal as he could manage to present himself in the given case. He felt that he had already established himself as the odd one out by coming in with a thus far unknown and unrecognised mental illness, by standing up against Drew, by wandering through the gardens and sitting on the swings for hours at times with John, and plainly by hanging around with Roger and Freddie, the latter of which he was beginning to understand had a reputation of being a drama queen at this place. He felt he had a hard enough time coping with life at Queen Mary’s as it was, and did not seek to complicate matters for himself. He was just managing to keep his head above the water as it was right now, and would like to keep floating for a while instead of voluntarily drowning himself by coming out for what he felt.

For all of these reasons, Brian was determined not to let anyone know how he really felt about John. He hid his blushes, his giggles, the shakiness of his knees and clam feeling of his hands whenever he had one of those moments when it really hit him how much he was in love with John. Despite all of his feelings and questions on the inside, and all the people buzzing around him all day of whom he sometimes had the feeling were monitoring every step he took, he was confident he could cover up before everyone for as long as he wanted - which was why it surprised him all the more that it was someone who he only got to see a few hours a week that discovered his secret; and more than that, to whom he was willing to admit his feelings.

It had been a regular Tuesday afternoon when Brian, directly after lunch, had separated from his roommates and hurried over to what they called the office hallway, in which most of the offices of psychiatrists and psychologists had been established for personal consults and appointments. As he hurried past the people who were standing around in front of the door of the canteen, he thought of how convenient it was that this hallway was situated right next to the canteen - for if he had needed to run through half of the building in order to get to the office of his psychiatrist, he was sure he would run late. Lunch time at Queen Mary’s was scheduled between twelve and one PM every day, but with a rowdy crowd of hungry and bored people, a lack of kitchen staff and meal servers, and general disruptions over people who would punch other people for cheating their way into the queue, the first meals would usually not be served until fifteen minutes after the official time. With Freddie, Roger, and John having unanimously decided way before Brian had bent sent in to avoid the pushing masses and just wait until most people would have their food before they would get up and join the remainders of the queue, they usually would not be served their food before 12:40. The scanty amount of dry bread and bruised fruits that would be left by then would, in principle, not take longer than ten minutes to get through, but there was one factor that always stretched out the duration of their lunch meals - all of their meals, for that matter - by at least three times, and that factor was called Freddie Bulsara.

Freddie was one of Queen Mary’s patients of whom you would hardly notice was suffering from mental illness most of the time. Unless most of the people at the place - including his three roommates - he did not suffer from depression, and was unusually cheery among the many gloomy faces Queen Mary’s hosted. He was one of the only people to voluntarily get up and go places, such as the activity room or the fitness, or to talk to other people for reasons other than because he needed to use the one soap dispenser in the bathroom next. That having been said, his illness manifested almost solely during meal time or in the moments previous to it, when he would do all that was within his power to take in as less food, fat, sugar, calories, or whatever quantity he counted in as possible.

It was a full-time operation for the three of his friends to drag Freddie over to the canteen, to make him leave the food queue with actual food on his plate, and to then make sure the food would leave his plate not through ending op on the floor, in the planter, or whatever way he could find to dump his food, but to eat it instead. Freddie had somehow raised the activity of distracting people into what Roger at times called the Art of Distraction; with his observations considering small changes in their surroundings, their schedules, and the behaviour of the people around them which he brought up during mealtimes, he could make whoever it was who was trying to make him eat lay off their mission by his comments either about something as small as what he had overheard Nolan or Jasper or whichever staff member in the hallway that morning, or something as big as questioning the infinity of the universe. Brian was convinced Freddie could distract everyone - from a hunter on the brink of shooting an ignorant deer to the president making his inauguration speech - everyone apart from John. Freddie could bring up crusades in Medieval France, famine in the horn of Africa, or side effects of the polio vaccinations of 1954, but John never budged, never gave in, never let himself be distracted by Freddie’s tricks. Brian was sure that if it had not been for John, they would spent three hours on each meal a day, and still not have advanced a single step in making Freddie eat. With his persistence, however, they had just about managed to make Freddie eat three slices of apple and half a slice of bread with the thinnest layer of butter Brian had ever seen, before the last twenty minutes of lunch break had passed. The clock then struck one, and Brian had been in a hurry to toss his tray aside, agree to meet the rest of the people in the dorm room at two, and rush into the hallway to hopefully make it to his meeting with his psychiatrist on time.

Brian just came rushing into the hallway when he saw Sarah standing in front of her office shaking hands with a guy he vaguely recognised - he must have seen him around the place sometimes - and taking leave of him. Brian flashed the guy a bit of a weak smile when he passed by in a half-walk half-jog sort of motion, and stopped right in front of Sarah. It was only when Brian had to rest one hand on his knee and the other against the open door in order to sustain himself that he noticed how out of breath he was. He had never been an athletic type of person, and, apart from that time John and he had fled drug searches by rushing towards John’s cave, running was something he had not done in ages - which seemed to show in moments like these.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he panted towards Sarah, believing he owed her an apology and an explanation for showing up late and half out of breath. ‘Freddie’s always a hassle during lunch time- and breakfast… every mealtime. Especially dinner-’ he blurted out somewhat incoherently as he felt at his cheeks and found that they were warmer than he would have hoped for. Sarah, on the other hand, did not seemed to mind any of it, and waved all Brian’s attempts at excuses and explanations away.

‘I know, I know of his eating disorder. You don’t have to apologise for it. I’m glad to hear his friends are looking after him - certainly since it became too much for staff to handle him in combination with the rest of the eating disorder group,’ Sarah said with a grateful smile. Brian knew she probably meant this as a compliment to his group of friends for looking after each other, but all Brian could hear in her speech was a staff member admitting that they were collectively failing as an institution.

‘Please come on in, Brian,’ Sarah welcomed him as she moved away from the somewhat rough introduction they had had that afternoon. Brian walked through the door and took a seat in one of the three leather chairs spread around her office, and Sarah, after having closed and locked the door (probably to prevent him from running out of the door again like he had done that time after discussing the lack of consequences for the people accountable for the death of Jimmy, Brian thought to himself) sat down on a chair across from him with her folder.

‘Well then, Brian,’ Sarah said, opening up her folder and flicking through the pages until she stopped at a relatively empty page that had his patient number printed out on the upper side. For the sake of patient privacy, documents were not being given names, but were sorted on the number assigned to each patient. Even in describing observations, feelings, and symptoms of their patients, medical workers of Queen Mary’s would never note down their names; they would always scribble down that ‘the patient felt disturbed upon waking up this morning’ or that ‘nr. P324456 experiences hallucinations’ or something the like. This was said to be done so that in case of stealing, no one apart from people working at Queen Mary’s could trace back to whom the documents belonged. The thought of this sounded nice and safe to Brian, but he could not help feeling more like an object than a living organism whenever he saw Sarah describing him by his number instead of by his name.

‘We last saw each other three days ago. How have you been doing since?’ Sarah asked.

‘Good,’ Brian was quick to say. ‘Yes, pretty good, I’d say. Things have been pretty fine.’

‘That’s good to hear,’ Sarah said, scribbling down the first notes into her notepad. ‘Can you elaborate on that?’

‘Well… I don’t know,’ Brian admitted a bit helplessly, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I’ve been feeling better than I did before, I guess. I feel less of a tendency to get away from crowds all the time, and I sleep better than I did before.’

Sarah nodded, and Brian saw her flicking through the pages of her folder, until she stopped to trace her pen over what looked to be a quickly-sketched diagram. ‘It was on the ninth, so about two weeks ago, that you told me you slept very poorly at night. Could hardly fall asleep, woke up multiple times a night…’ she read from her own descriptions. ‘But that’s better now?’

‘Certainly. I almost never wake up during the night anymore,’ Brian said, fiddling with the hem of his shirt while Sarah expanded the diagram and added some details he could not understand from his point of view to it.’

‘That’s very positive news,’ Sarah said, looking up shortly at him for the first time to give him a smile. ‘How are your thoughts and emotions? Are they all over the place, as you said once, or are they starting to become more coherent?’

‘They’re starting to get more coherent,’ Brian told her. He indeed had periods in time when he felt as if his thoughts were spinning so out of control that he could hardly keep track of them, but lately they had been rather domesticated, as to say so. They were not going all over the place, from one subject to the other, from positive to negative, from happy to devastated to furious, as he had experienced them to do at times. His mind seemed to be more at rest lately, less jumpy between sensations and emotions, more focussed on the same subject for a longer time. That this perhaps was a result of him being able to think of nothing else but John for most of the time, was something Brian decided he might better not add to the answer he had given.

Brian tried to hide his smile behind the fingers he brought up to rub his chin, and was glad that Sarah did not notice; she again did not look up when she continued with the next question.

‘Any self-harming?’

Even though Brian knew Nolan had told his psychiatrist, therapist, and group therapy leader of his self-harming tendencies following his confession of it upon his first day at Queen Mary’s, he still could not help feeling weird whenever someone else than Nolan or John brought it up. Even Nolan was somebody he wished he could hypnotise into forgetting he had ever admitted having self-harmed to; if it was all up to Brian, he would make sure that no one else apart from John would possess this information about him. John was, after all, the only one he wanted to talk with about these matters, so he was quick to discard the topic with Sarah.

‘Not anymore,’ he said plainly. Unfortunately, his psychiatrist thought it worth more words.

‘Not at all?’ Sarah asked, sounding positively surprised with this answer.

‘No, not at all. Both physically and mental-’ Brian cut himself off half-sentence when he caught Sarah looking at him with surprise. He instantly remembered that mental self-harm was not a term she had introduced to him, but which John had coined - and, not willing to start about John right now out of fear he would start blushing and smiling like an idiot, he quickly cut himself off. ‘No self-harm anymore.’

‘That’s impressive. Especially after the death of Jimmy,’ Sarah said, noting down her own words. ‘How about that, by the way? You took that rather personal.’

‘It’s… I still think about it, but it’s not following me everywhere I go anymore. I’ve found some distraction,’ Brian said with a small smile on his face when he thought of the item John had surprised him with to ‘get his mind off the matter’, as he had called it at the time.

‘Distraction… very good. And what is your source of distraction?’ Sarah questioned, and Brian noticed himself starting to fiddle with a lock of hair - something he otherwise would never do - while he sought the appropriate answer for this question.

‘A roommate… friend of mine, I mean, fixed me a guitar,’ he said, not managing to wholly oppress the smile that tugged at the corners of his lips.

‘A guitar! How marvellous,’ Sarah said, seeming genuinely pleased for him as she incessantly scribbled on. ‘I did not know you played.’

‘I’ve played for years, you see. I think I started when I was about fifteen - my father and me built our own guitar,’ Brian explained with a fitting amount of pride in his voice. Deciding to leave out the part where his depression had left him unable to pick up his beloved Red Special for the last number of months before his admission to Queen Mary’s, Brian concluded with an inoppressible smile: ‘So I was very glad to have a guitar back at my disposal again.’

‘I can very well believe that,’ Sarah said, before she changed the topic around as a result of something Brian wished he had not done. ‘I’m also noticing that you corrected ‘roommate’ to ‘friend’’, she said, and Brian felt his heart skip a beat just at the approach of the topic of his roommates. ‘Are you getting on well with your roommates?’

‘Very well, yes,’ Brian said automatically. It was the truth, but for some reason he felt as if it sounded fake now that he said it. It sounded as if he had something to hide - which, truth be told, he had. The thing about this secret he was trying to keep from everybody around him however was that it was supposed to stay a secret, and by making himself sound so suspicious - be it involuntarily - he knew changes were he would only make other people suspicious as well.

Brian was unsure if his previous answer had anything to do with the question Sarah asked him right after; her comment seemed innocent enough, but to Brian, it was as if someone had just threw him right into a wall.

‘Especially with John Deacon, isn’t it?’ Sarah asked him, and Brian had never hoped he would not colour as badly as he did right now. He wished Sarah would continue looking at her notepad like she had been doing for most of the session so far, but for some reason, his therapist found it important to look him dead in the eye at the exact moment she had brought up the name of Brian’s crush.

‘Eh… yes, we get on very well, I think,’ Brian said as neutrally as possible, his forefinger and thumb twisting faster around the curl he had captured between them. ‘We, eh, we’re roommates, as you know. And we’ve been assigned to the same therapy group.’

Sarah, who took notes of this comment, added to this: ‘I heard you’re also going outside a lot. Walk around the gardens, sit on the swings, talk for hours at times.’

Brian was unsure what to answer of this. He tried to tell himself that Sarah was not after him and his secret crush on a fellow patient - after all, she was calm and reasonable as ever, and probably wanted nothing more than to get some insight into the friendships he was developing at Queen Mary’s, which she would probably see as a sign of progress. But if she was after nothing than friendship, then why did she not bring up Freddie and Roger, but solely John? Why was the fact that they went outside together important enough for her to bring up to him during this session? Brian had never seen Sarah outside or anywhere near the portals for that matter - where on earth had she gotten the information about John and him going outside on a regular basis?

Dodging Sarah’s remarks and instead making room for his own question, Brian asked: ‘Who did you hear that from?’

‘Nolan told me, who got the information from the guards at the outer doors who take in your name whenever you go outside,’ Sarah told him as if it this was common protocol everyone at Queen Mary’s was aware of. When she saw the look of surprise on Brian’s face, she added: ‘Even if you don’t talk to your mentor for a while, he’s still keeping an eye on you, after all.’

Brian felt as if all the colour was being drained out of his face. He could not comprehend how it could be that no one at this place prevented bullying, violence, suicide; that staff were eternally coping with stress and a massive workload and a herd of patients to look after; that dozens of people were getting insufficient treatment compared to what their mental issues demanded; but when it came to how often two patients were strolling around the garden between the pair of them, the entire place seemed to have reports, statistics, and hypothesis as to the cause of their behaviour ready at hand. Why would staff focus on who he went outside with, when it was their task to help him overcome a severe depression and a borderline personality disorder, of which only God knew what it was?

‘Is there something wrong, Brian?’ Sarah remarked, probably seeing the empty look on his face. ‘You don’t like Nolan looking after you?’ she guessed when her patient remained quiet.

 _It’s what you call looking after you_ , Brian thought to himself, but decided not to speak these thoughts out loud. ‘I don’t mind that, really,’ he lied. ‘It’s just that…’

Brian found himself stuck at this point; he knew he had to be happy they had moved away from the topic of John, but he could not let go of the question that was growing inside of him with every mention of his contact with John: what did Sarah know about John, and more importantly, what did she know about John in relation to him?

Brian noticed Sarah staring at him still, so he eventually decided that he had little other option than to ask her what she knew about John and him - be it in a more subtle manner than to straight up admit that he felt uncomfortable having her look into his contacts with his secret love interest, that was. ‘Do you know John?’

‘Of course I do. He’s been around this place for a long time,’ she said, making it sound as if John had been at Queen Mary’s for at least a decade, and had become part of the furniture by now. ‘I think we all know him by now. It’s his quietness and reservation that makes him stand out from most people we have here. He never acts out towards anyone, no matter how he feels, and he’s said to be a great listener. I can see why you _like_ him.’

Brian would have found this last sentence troubling enough on its own; but with the strange emphasis Sarah placed on the word ‘like’, he became all the more stressed that she was meaning something more than simply him liking John as a friend. He knew he should not go into this if he did not want to stir matters up, but the words had left his mouth before he had had the time to think and check himself.

‘And what do you mean with that? With… liking him?’ he asked his psychiatrist quietly, his voice dripping with distrust.

Sarah, open as ever, sounded optimistic when she explained: ‘Well, he seems to me very similar to you, in the way he talks and the hobbies that he had, and the way he thrives in silence and around quiet people better than anywhere else. People mistake him for wanting to be alone; but what he really wants is just one quiet companion whom he can share all that is on his mind with - and, if I’m not mistaken, that’s exactly what you’re looking for, too.’ Without leaving Brian room to reflect on her conclusions, let alone to answer her, she said warmly: ‘John seems to be your type exactly.’

 _Type_. Yet another word that made Brian chew on the inside of his cheek and wonder if Sarah meant this as type of friend, or if she was choosing this vocabulary to lure him out of the safe corner he had placed himself into. He had a feeling she was pushing him into a certain direction where he would explain to her how he felt about John; either she already knew he was in love with him, or she was unexpectant and just wanted to test if all she had heard and observed through Jasper, Nolan, guards, or whoever else seemed to have their eyes on Brian, was true. Either way, she was trying to push her luck, and Brian was determined not to give in to her attempts at making him tell her his feelings for his roommate.

‘Have I said too much, Brian?’ Sarah asked when Brian remained silent for what must have been at least the third time within five minutes.

‘No, you haven’t,’ Brian said somewhat tersely. He thought Sarah was going to comment on how closed-up he had suddenly turned, but instead of this, she surprised him with a question Brian had no idea how to interpret.

‘Have I then said too little?’ she asked with a little tilt of the head.

Brian, forgetting his formerly curt attitude, frowned lightly and admitted shyly: ‘I… I don’t know what you mean by that.’

‘What I said about John, that you like him. Is that perhaps an understatement?’ Sarah asked him, and Brian, his fingers still twisting around that same lock of hair, stared down into his lap while his brain spun to find a proper answer to this all-too honest question.

‘Why, I don’t just ‘like’ him, as one would do with a friend. I like him more than that. Like, I mean, I like him more than a _normal_ friend,’ he quickly corrected himself when he realised what he had just unintentionally said. ‘I like him as a best friend. Yes, that’s it - he’s my best friend. The best I’ve ever had,’ Brian said, knowing for a fact his face must have turned scarlet by now. Sarah looked at him with a neutral expression; he figured she was wondering how anyone could know for sure they had found the best friend they had ever had in less than a month time. He looked away again and tried to come up with answers to this exact question he expected she was going to ask, but it did not follow. Instead, she made yet another observation Brian wished she hadn’t.

‘You’re still holding back,’ Sarah said calmly as she closed one leg over the other. Sitting in her chair like that with her folder on her lap and a pen in her hand, she looked like she was ready for Brian to admit his entire history with John - as far as one existed in the period of three and a half weeks.

‘What… am I supposed to be holding back?’ Brian asked; he was starting to feel all too well in what direction she was heading, but he would not let himself be taken there, at least not without a fight.

‘That’s what I’m asking you. What is it about John and you?’ she asked, a voice so frank and inquisitive it made Brian face the wall to avoid her face, afraid that both the sound and the sight of her would have been too much for him to handle at that specific moment. ‘You go everywhere together. You refuse to sit apart at group therapy according to Jasper, and none of the activity presence lists ever hold one of our names without the other following immediately,’ she summed up, and Brian, searching for a comeback, interrupted her eventually.

‘Why, am I not allowed to go places with my best friend?’ he asked, hoping Sarah did not notice how he was just coming up with questions distracting them from the main point as a way of stay of execution. Brian was convinced that sooner or later Sarah would ask him straight to the point what his status towards John was, but he was not ready to give in yet.

Sarah, however, seemed more than ready to drag the information right out of him. ‘The only other two people I know at this place that are that close are Roger Taylor and Freddie Bulsara,’ she told him, which had Brian thinking for a suitable answer for a moment.

‘What about them?’

‘They’re in a relationship,’ she said plainly, and Brian had to oppress the tendency to cover his face with his hands and give in to his feelings - and with that, his defeat - already. He wondered why he saw admitting out loud that he was in love with John would feel like such a defeat when in fact it was nothing but a manifestation of love, but he soon remembered his own concerns - being picked on, being seen as the odd one out like he always seemed to end up wherever he went, having his sexuality treated like an illness for all he knew. He therefore decided still to keep his lips clenched - literally, for that matter, because he had no idea how to react to Sarah’s observations without betraying himself at the same instance.

‘Listen, Brian. I don’t want to force you into anything you don’t want to talk about,’ Sarah said - which sounded funny to Brian, as this was exactly what she had been doing for half of the session so far, ‘but if you ask me there are two options. I’ve read into your diagnosis a bit,’ she said, getting up to pick up a folder she had left on her desk and walking back over again. ‘Borderline. The name is based on the idea that the sufferer constantly finds himself stuck between two extremes - hallucination and hyperreality, emotional oversensitivity and emptiness, everything is black and white…’ she read from the paper, leaving Brian to wonder where on earth she was heading, and what this had to do with him being in love with John, or whatever she wanted him to admit about John. ‘But I don’t need to tell you that - you were there when professor Sumner came up with his thesis.’

‘I sure was,’ Brian grumbled, but Sarah either did not hear him, or chose to ignore him.

Flicking through the pages, Sarah told him: ‘There is this thing professor Sumner calls idolisation and denunciation, simplified to ‘all-or-nothing’. Do you remember these terms?’

‘He used them once to describe my relationship with my parents,’ Brian shrugged loosely, still not seeing where this was going.

‘So you’re familiar with the words, which is great,’ Sarah said. ‘So if I’ve done my research correctly, there are two options, the first of which is that you’ve fallen into a pattern of idolisation and denunciation with John - in which you at first - which is right now - only see all the good things about him, and admire him to the point of venerating him, only to later turn completely against him.’

Brian was familiar with the all-or-nothing-theory, but having it applied to his own situation with John was something he could not help frowning at. Perhaps he did admire John a bit too much than anyone else would have done, as a result of the situation he was currently finding himself in - having been dropped off at a mental clinic by his parents and desperate to find someone to cling on to - but he could never picture himself suddenly turning against anyone that badly, and especially not against someone who meant as much to him as John did.

‘I don’t think… With all due respect, but I don’t think that applies to my situation,’ Brian said.

‘Me neither,’ Sarah answered, much to Brian’s surprise. If Sarah herself did not even believe in her own theory, then why had she brought it up? It would not make sense unless she had put the example of idolisation and denunciation out there if she did not believe it herself, unless she was using it to contrast it to a much more reasonable option-

Of course. That was what she was doing - comparing this ridiculous idea of Brian’s obsession with John to an actually reasonable alternative; an alternative they both knew, but which he himself refused to say out loud. When Sarah also remained quiet, as if she expected Brian to fill in the second option by himself, Brian threw the question back at her.

‘So then what’s the other option?’ Brian asked. He realised Sarah must know by now he was just playing ignorant, but he did not care - he was pulling every trick in the book out to delay the inevitable end station of this conversation.

‘You spend all your time with John. You follow him wherever he goes. You refuse to even not sit next to him. I cannot even bring up his name without you starting to blush,’ she said, leaving Brian unsure whether she left a few seconds pause just to prove this last point she had made (as he could feel his cheeks heating up), or if she wanted a moment of silence to make the bomb hit him a little harder when she said: ‘You’re in love.’

Well, and there it was. Brian knew this was going to come up - had anticipated yet twirled around it for most of the conversation - and now that the answer had finally been uttered, he still felt like he was not ready. He had not been ready to hear the words coming either from Sarah or from himself, but it was too late now; the shot had been fired, and Sarah was waiting for his response.

‘So which one is it?’ she asked after a pause that must have lasted at least thirty seconds, and felt yet longer than that. Her voice was surprisingly quiet; for the first time since they had kicked off this conversation, Brian did not feel like she was pushing him into a certain direction, even though this was literally the moment where she asked him to choose whether he idolised John or whether he sincerely was in love with him. It was odd, almost out of character for the usually outspoken Sarah to leave this moment up to him - and seeing her like this added up greatly to Brian’s incapability to come up with a decent answer.

‘You know I have professional secrecy. All that you tell me will stay between you and me,’ Sarah reminded him. Brian weakly thought of all the other people working at Queen Mary’s who were constantly exchanging information about where he was and who he was with between each other, but Sarah looked so sincere and even vulnerable at the moment that he did not dare bring this up against her; in that specific moment, he almost gave in to admitting what was on his mind, if it had not been for Sarah starting to talk again before he could.

‘You don’t have to tell me. I just thought it might be good for you to get things off your chest,’ Sarah said. ‘Look, Brian, I haven’t known you for long, but I think I’ve been able to make up a bit of a picture of you. You’re not the kind of person to rush in with a big group of people; you’d rather have one good friend than a hundred distant ones. You’ve found an amazing companion in John, and you can tell him all you want to tell him, but you cannot confess you’re in love with him,’ Sarah said, and Brian chewed down his lower lip to distract himself from Sarah’s way too honest words. ‘And that’s what I’m here for,’ his psychiatrist continued. ‘For the things you can’t talk about with John. So if you want to tell me something, anything about your feelings for John… you can go ahead and know all you say is safe with me.’

After having let all of these words sink in, Brian found that he was no longer able to keep his secret to himself; and finding himself here with Sarah, locked inside a sound-proof therapy room where no one could either see or overhear them, Brian decided that it was time to close his eyes and let out what he had kept within himself all that time.

‘I’m afraid it’s… that I’m in love,’ Brian whispered, and for the first time that session, he looked Sarah straight in the eyes as he spoke and in the moments after, during which she just looked at him and nodded slowly at him. He had somewhat expected Sarah to smile self-confidently and announce her victory, but she did none of this; she did not even bring out her pen to write down an entire paragraph on his confessions. Instead of telling him that it was about time he came out to her, Sarah completely disregarded his confession, and instead focussed on the way how he had bought the message rather than the message itself.

‘Why are you saying you are ‘afraid’ you are in love?’ Sarah asked, eternally staying true to her profession. ‘Are you afraid your borderline is messing with you after all?’

‘No, no, that’s not the thing,’ Brian shook his head. ‘It’s more that… you know, I’ve fallen in love with someone from around here. A patient,’ he said, staring at the toe of his shoes.

‘Well, that’s not as surprising as you might think. Research shows that living together with people increases chances of developing people for said feelings,’ Sarah informed him. ‘I can look up the article I read on that a few months ago for you. It deals with a lot of technical data, but I know you have a university background, so that should not be a problem for you,’ Sarah said.

While Brian would have appreciated her seeing him as an equal and wanting to share interesting data with him any other moment, he right now could not be moved to be enthusiastic about sociological research; he was more engaged with the consequences he feared caving come out to Sarah was going to have for his treatment and reputation among the staff, let alone the patients.

‘I… I don’t know if you missed it, but… patients here… Including John… are male,’ Brian managed a bit awkwardly. Sarah looked at him with an intense stare that almost made Brian cower back into his chair, but this feeling soon broke up when Sarah burst out into laughter.

‘I got about that far, yes,’ she laughed. ‘We’re an all-male institution. Patients in this place generally are male,’ she said, by the time of which her laughter had turned into something closer to a giggle.

‘And that’s… fine with you?’ Brian asked carefully. ‘You don’t think that’s weird? Or just plain wrong?’

‘Why would I think that?’ Sarah asked, the giggles by now having been cast aside now that she understood her patient had been worried about his sexuality possibly being seen as a faulty personality trait therapy had to work out of him.

‘Because… I’m in love with a man? Like… Most people would not accept that,’ Brian said, his voice as quiet as he could manage.

‘Then it’s a good thing we’re not ‘most people’ at this place,’ Sarah smiled. ‘I know it’s 1971. When was homosexuality legalised again? Was it 1966 or 1967?’

‘Sixty-seven,’ Brian helped her out.

‘Sixty-seven then. It’s been four years since the government decided being gay was not a crime. Many modern psychiatrists, however, had long before gotten to the conclusion that homosexuality is not a disease or a mental disorder, but part of human nature.’

‘Mine didn’t, though,’ Brian mumbled.

‘Professor Sumner? Did you bring up your sexuality to him?’

‘I didn’t yet know I was… you know, attracted to men back then. But I heard him speak negatively of homosexuality a few times. Saying there was a reason it was classified as a mental illness in the DSM,’ Brian told Sarah.

Sarah, with a glance at said book that was lying on her desk, said: ‘The DSM was first introduced in 1968, and already psychiatrists complained of homosexuality being described as a mental illness in it. They announced in the Journal of Psychiatry, a global magazine read by psychiatrists like myself, that they will host a convention which will include voting among psychiatrists about the status of homosexuality, which in turn will be part of the revised version of the DSM, which is due in 1973. I have good hopes they will outvote homosexuality from the DSM,’ she said with confidence, even though Brian still seemed sceptical.

‘But that’s what you’re saying. What do other staff at Queen Mary’s say of homosexuality or whatever it is I am?’

‘They might not all personally agree with it being part of human nature,’ Sarah said. ‘But as an institution we have collectively decided to treat it as such, and not as a mental illness. We are here to cure depression and eating disorders and the like, not people’s love life.’

Brian was relieved to hear this, but still… ‘But Nolan told me there are people in here purely because they feel like they were born in the wrong body, right?’

‘I know. Gender identity disorder is a hotly discussed topic, both in the medical world as here within our team. Most people who are new to the field agree that this, like homosexuality, is not a disorder, and the older psychiatrists are convinced that it is,’ Sarah told him.

‘And what do you think?’

‘I think it’s part of human nature, of how you were born, or whatever way you wish to describe it. I don’t think it’s curable with medicines or therapy at any rate,’ Sarah said. ‘But you do not have to worry about any of that; we are still out on the way to acceptance of gender identity disorder, but we’ve at least come as far as to agree that being gay is not a mental disorder.’

While the first part of this conclusion was not exactly satisfying to Brian, he was at last glad to hear that none of the staff would openly oppose to whatever his sexual identity was, and that none of them could force him into therapy for it.

Still, forever needing reassurance, he asked Sarah timidly: ‘So you don’t think I’m dangerous?’

‘Dangerous?’ she repeated in disbelief. ‘Brian, I have clients who’ve confessed they feel a tendency to engage in arson, kidnapping, torture, rape, murder… You being in love with another patient is the most harmless thing I’ve heard all day.’

Again, the first part of that sentence did not exactly come as a comfort to Brian, who could not help but wonder who he should be vigilant with when catching them alone in the bathroom at night. Hearing that Sarah had no objection to his liking John to a larger degree than just friendship was however a consolation to Brian, and he could not help but comment on it by saying: ‘so you don’t feel weird or unsafe around me now?’

‘Unsafe? Dear boy, did you really think you were dangerous?’ Sarah asked, sounding both endeared and saddened by the notions Brian had gotten into his head. ‘If you were, would not we already have separated you right from the moment we found out your affection for John?’

Brian did not know how many times it had happened before, but he guessed this must have been at least the fifth time of the day that staff of Queen Mary’s had managed to baffle him with one of their stalkerish practices they apparently engaged in on a daily basis. ‘So you _knew_ all along?’

‘Well, knowing is a big word,’ Sarah tried to level the question. ‘But I had my suspicions for sure. ‘I observe your group during group therapy at times, so I had noticed…’

Though he knew it was rude, Brian could not help having to comment right there, right then, even if it was in the middle of Sarah’s sentence. ‘You observe…’

‘Not specifically your group because you’re part of it, but any group that stays in the canteen for group therapy,’ Sarah was quick to explain the situation, even though Brian was unsure if by doing this she was really making things look any better for herself and for Queen Mary’s in general. ‘Professor Imholz, doctor O’Hara, and I are doing research into group interaction to see how groups of people with similar disorders react to each other, and how they engage with the group leaders. At the same time we also check the effectiveness of group therapy, to see if this is a form of therapy we should continue using in the future, or if therapy with smaller groups, or on individual basis, is more effective,’ Sarah said.

 _I can give you the answer to that without needing to observe anyone right now_ , Brian thought as the images of bored patients and stressed-out group leaders popped up in his mind, making it hard for him to still focus on how Sarah was explaining away how she had ended up knowing all about his feelings for John by observing them from a distance.

‘We do not look at- or listen to individual people, but look at the functioning of the group from a distance, usually by sitting a few tables away from a therapy group with only the group leaders knowing we’re listening. But of course, you start to notice specific things; people who are loud, provocative, or exceptionally quiet… and then there were John and you, who seemed to have been glued together. We could not help but notice that,’ Sarah smiled, and then, with a more serious expression, mentioned: ‘None of that will end up in the final research papers, of course. All personal details will be wiped out.’

Brian would have preferred to at this point have been able to tell Sarah he would rather not be part of research of any kind or sort, following his bad experiences with his previous psychiatrist - but after she had just been so kind and supportive of him, he decided against this plan. More than this, even if he would have wanted to, he would have had to switch back to the previous topic again; for Sarah, by the time Brian had figured out what he could possibly say to both be to the point yet kind, had already moved on to the next stage of the session. She pulled a paper out of her folder with the words ‘Working towards emotional stability’ at the top of it, and before Brian knew it, he was knee deep into exercises surrounding hypothetical situations in which his emotions would probably be heavily disturbed.

While at this assignment, the topic of John and his feelings for him never completely left Brian, but still he found that the remaining forty-five minutes of the session went past without him worrying all too much about it. It was only when Sarah got up and directed him towards the door to lead him out and gave Brian a few last words to close off this session that he remembered everything again.

‘Our next appointment has been planned for Friday, so I’ll see you again in three days,’ Sarah said as they shook hands. ‘As for your homework… It seems like a good idea to me if you were to write a letter to John to express what you feel about him. You don’t have to send it to him, it’s just for yourself, to get some insight into your own feelings.’

Brian, a bit dazed upon hearing this, stared at Sarah with what he was sure must have been a silly look, but he eventually managed to nod and wish her a nice day. He was so engaged with his own thoughts upon leaving Sarah’s office that he almost walked into the next person standing in line for their session. He mumbled some soft-spoken apology without turning around to see over whose feet he had almost tripped, and walked right through the hallway. He was so deeply consumed by his own thoughts that he almost tripped twice on his way upstairs to the dorm rooms. The session had turned out completely different from what he had expected; after having told himself over and over again he was not going to let anyone in on his feelings towards John as it was at the moment, he could still hardly believe he had opened up to Sarah the way he did. He went over the whole conversation multiple times in his own head while walking back to the dorm room, but he could not remember or figure out how it had happened that Sarah had pulled the confession of his love for John out of him. It remained a mystery to him until the very moment he pulled the key to his dorm room out of the back pockets of his trousers to open the door - and it did so long afterwards, for he did not have any more time to consider the matter when the door was jerked open from the opposite side of the wall to reveal a beaming Freddie smiling at him.

‘Hi there, dear! We’re glad to have you back!’ Freddie’s voice was close to an exclamation, and Brian - after having overcome the initial shock he had felt upon encountering what seemed to be a self-opening door - was left wondering what on earth he had done to receive such a warm welcome. It was as if he had been gone on an expedition to Antarctica for three months rather than to a one hour long meet-up with his psychiatrist; but he soon found out why Freddie was so excited to have him return to the dorm.

‘Is that you, Brian?’ a voice from the other side of the room asked. By the weariness of the tone of it, Brian could immediately make it out to be John. He was not given the chance to answer that it indeed was him, for his roommate immediately followed with an equally tired-sounding: ‘Flee while you still can.’

‘What’s the reason this time?’ Brian said coolly, but he remained standing in the doorway rather hesitantly, unsure of what it was that he had to look out for this time. He had a feeling it had something to do with Freddie being so enthusiastic about his return, and that Freddie wanted them to do something none of them felt like. Brian’s eyes wandered off to the mensch-ärgere-dich-nicht game that was left untouched on the table, and he sighed. He knew Freddie had been fixed on playing it ever since he had produced the board game from the activity room or wherever he had gotten it from, but right now, he really did not feel like it. He was just opening his mouth to let Freddie know he was not in the mood for it, but Freddie spoke first - and once he had declared what he wanted them to do, Brian could only wish it would have been that stupid board game instead.

‘No, you shouldn’t flee! It’s gonna be fun!’ Freddie said, sounding indignant. ‘We’re going to the library to sort out the books!’

‘Sort out books?’ Brian repeated sceptically after a bit of a pause. He knew that there was a library at Queen Mary’s - or that was, a room with shelves of books and some desks scattered around the place which they were supposed to call the library. He had even been there a few times when he had ran out of things to do, but had not been too impressed by the collection of old-fashioned novels which - judging by the price stickers on the inside and the mark of ‘TILLERSON’S THRIFT STORE’ all over the first page of each book - had been donated by a second hand shop who had not managed to sell them. The stacks of informational books, including semi-scientific magazines from before the war, printed-out university theses, and dated encyclopaedias, also had not managed to attract his attention for more than three minutes before he had decided to pull out some Jane Austen and Charles Dickens classics everyone had always told him to read, judging that he might as well read these now he had nothing better to do.

‘Freddie signed us all up to put all the books in the library back on the right shelves and in alphabetical order for the rest of the day,’ Roger explained, bringing Brian back to the topic of the moment. Brian opened his mouth to ask about the _who_ , _what_ , and mainly _why_ of this activity, but was cut short again by an overly enthusiastic Freddie.

‘The rest of the day’ meaning from now until dinner. And it’ll be fun, going out and doing things together!’ Freddie said.

‘We also could have played music together instead of wasting our time on this useless project,’ Roger muttered, but was countered once again by his boyfriend.

‘It’s not useless! It’s going to be very valuable work to put everything back into the right place again. Rick told me this hasn’t been done in years, and everything is all over the place.’

Brian had no idea who Rick was - supposed he was someone who worked or volunteered at the library - but what he _did_ know was that he already did not like Rick for having given Freddie the idea of tidying up the library. Or, that was, he did not mind Rock having given Freddie the idea if Freddie had just kept it to himself, instead of extending it to all four of them and signing them up for this involuntary voluntary work.

It was John who asked a question they all had on their mind. ‘Then why doesn’t Rick do it himself if it’s so important to him?’

‘Because!’ Freddie said, sounding insulted just by being asked this question. ‘He has more things to do, darling. He works at the administration and the laundry centre, and took up the library on top of that. He’s so kind and works so hard, it’s about time we did something to give back to him. So when the list was put up in the canteen to help sorting out the library, I was the first to sign us all up.’

‘And the _only_ one on top of that, probably,’ John muttered in protest.

Freddie, knowing that this was probably true but not wanting to admit it, said: ‘All the more reason to go over there right now. Get up, dears, we’ve got some work to do.’

# # #

The ‘some work’ Freddie had spoken of turned out to be an understatement; it was rather ‘a _huge amount_ of work’. They did not say a word about it when at first Rick enthusiastically showed them into the library and thanked them for volunteering, but they all realised they had been signed up for a task that would take _days_ to complete. The books on the shelves at the one side of the room were so closely packed that it surprised them the bookcase had not burst out of its joints yet, while the other side was almost empty, save from a few dusty old magazines. Boxes of books of which Brian could not tell whether they were old or new occupied the tables in the middle of the room and the floor around it, and piles and piles of books next to the counter completed the chaotic vibe of the room. Brian felt the small amount of willpower he had managed to hold on to until that moment draining out of his body at the sight of the library, and Roger and especially John looked as if they were ready to turn around and march out of the room without another word. Freddie, however, was all smiles when Rick showed them around the place and quickly explained how everything - that unfortunately included the piles and boxes of books - had to be sorted out and set up in the right categories. Each genre had its own shelf space, and it was up to the four of them to put everything back in order.

The four of them, indeed; for Roger’s question if any more people had signed up to volunteer was answered in the negative, and Rick himself had to help out in the kitchen, where two staff members having called in sick for work threatened a delay of dinner that evening. Within five minutes of them entering the library they were left on their own, and the first thing to do was of course to give a few angry glares into Freddie’s direction. Freddie, however, defended his decision to sign them all up without their knowledge and permission by saying that the library needed it so badly, that Rick deserved some help, that they would be all the more comfortable working with the four of them instead of with other random patients darting around them, and that they would get many privilege points for volunteering in a clean-up action like this. Even though none of them were particularly convinced of any of these statements apart from the fact that they indeed would rather be with the four of them than to have other patients they hardly knew hanging around, they knew there was no backing out of the task now, and decided to set out and go to work.

Freddie was quick to run over to the novels, the section that clearly interested him most, and Roger dived into the boxes of books that had been displayed on the tables. Brian and John were left standing next to each other and face each other, both knowing they had to get going but neither of them knowing where to start.

‘What do you think the least boring section will be?’ Brian asked John, who glanced around the room as if he was searching for this requested section.

‘I don’t think such a section exists,’ John concluded. ‘What we can do, however, is work as far away from those two as possible,’ he proposed with a nod towards Freddie and Roger, who were already furiously flicking through rows and boxes full of books and commented on everything that passed their hands. Brian chuckled for a bit; he knew that it was going to annoy John endlessly if Freddie and Roger were to continue talking about random book titles the entire time, so even though he knew it was not entirely kind, he agreed to relocate to the outer side of the room. They found themselves between informational books and magazines, and unanimously deciding that elementary biologic classification and the laws of science were more interesting than the faded female-oriented novels Freddie was digging into, they settled down at said place.

Brian crouched down to work on the lower shelves, while John pulled over a chair and sorted out the books on the middle shelves. They talked quietly about the seemingly useless books they found, showed each other covers of ancient-looking manuals they joked they might be able to sell to a museum, and tossed out books that did not belong to the informational and scientific book shelves. These were to be relocated later, they decided, creating separate spaces for where they would stack up novels, fantasy, non-fiction, history, and whatever more it was they found between books on accountancy and the rain forests of the Amazon. Even though they talked quite a bit between the pair of them, they could still overhear nearly every word of the conversation going on between Roger and Freddie, whose volume seemed to have reached an all-time high by the time Roger opened a third box that consisted of nothing but books he deemed to be useless.

‘Would you look at this box right here!’ Roger said, and even though John rolled his eyes, both he and Brian could not help facing the direction of their roommate to see what it was he had to show them. ‘Fascism and imperialism in Jane Austen’s _Mansfield Park_ , the history of persecution of protestants by the Spanish Inquisition in The Hague in the sixteenth century, the century of the debate: the foundation of socialism and liberalism in eighteenth century France… Who on earth writes such books?!’ he exclaimed, sounding repelled by simply the idea of engaging in the voluntary study of the aforementioned subjects.

‘Roger, darling, yours are not books but articles, to begin with,’ Freddie corrected him, which made John huff out a laugh. It surprised neither of them that Roger could not make out the difference between a book and a magazine article, but the point Roger continued to make was valid enough.

‘What on earth do we need articles for? Is anyone going to study hysteria in the time of the Roman Empire and come out as a successful historian upon being released from this prison?’ Roger asked as he tossed the book he held in hands into the direction of the history bookcase.

‘Remember that staff also makes use of this library, dear,’ Freddie said, his hands full of novels.

‘I can’t imagine them being interested in ‘an extended overview of eastern European birds of prey’ any more than we are,’ Roger countered him.

‘Oh, come on, who does not like seeing pictures of birds!’ Freddie brought in.

‘I mean _actual_ birds with feathers, Freddie. Not pictures of Slavic girls dressed up in Playboy attire,’ Roger grinned at his boyfriend, and in turn had to duck when a copy of Henry James’ _Daisy Miller_ was flung into his direction by Freddie. The book missed him by at least a metre, landed against a pile of books stack on the edge of a shelf, and took half of these with it towards the ground. Freddie clamped a hand over his mouth when he saw it happen, but Roger merely laughed, and Brian and even John, after having exchanged a glance, could not help smiling at the ridiculous chain of events.

‘Come on, Fred. You even _throw_ like a bird,’ Roger laughed. ‘And I don’t mean bird as in girl, but an actual bird with two legs and no forepaws to throw with!’

Brian could tell that John was trying not to be amused by the stupidity of their roommates, but the smile that continued to grace his face when he turned back to his own shelf of books betrayed them.

‘Listening to those two will never not amuse me,’ Brian smiled, and John grinned along with him.

‘Most of the time hearing Roger’s voice just annoys me, but today he’s actually making a valid point. I have a depression already. All these theses reports on the link between eating 125 grams of broccoli each day and going bald at the age of 35 years and four months are going to do is make me question my existence even more,’ John said as he turned the books with said cover towards Brian, which had his friend laugh. It were moment like these when he felt so double about John; they were having such fun that he was sure he would never again find a friend around whom he would feel quite this comfortable, but at the same time, the wittiness of his character and the way he smiled at every joke they either heard or produced, made Brian fall deeper and deeper in love with John with every passing second. John was so funny, so clever, so admirable that he made him grow week in the knees, and he did not even know any of the things he did to Brian. He was so innocently likeable to Brian, who had to avert his face before it would show how he looked at John as if he was the best thing that had happened to him in a long, long time - if not ever.

‘Really, the things people write about…’ Brian said with a shaky sigh. Feeling that it was his time to make a joke now, he turned to the pile of books he had just sorted out, and picked up one that looked particularly useless to him. ‘The evolution of earth worms. As far as I’m concerned earth worms have no brains of any mentionable size, so I can hardly understand how anyone could write a two-hundred page long book on that.’

John, with a widening smile, said: ‘For that matter we might as well throw ninety percent of books on human evolution out of the windows, because most of the people I’ve met here have not yet shown any more signs of intelligent life than the average earth worm _despite_ allegedly having brains.’

Brian giggled at this - it was a sound he despised himself for making, and he was quick to cut himself off. He could not imagine John possibly liking the sound of his neighing - which was why it was all the more unfortunate that John, the second after Brian had imposed silence upon himself, came up with another remark that made Brian lose his carefully kept composure.

‘I think I found the perfect book for Freddie,’ John said to Brian, who looked up to study the book John was holding up at him. ‘Insecurity and overcompensation,’ John read aloud with a contagious smile on his face.

For Brian, however, the joke was worth more than a smile; he produced something in the middle of a laugh and a cry. ‘John!’ Brian could not help exclaiming upon seeing the title of the book, after which he habitually covered his mouth with his hand to hide his excessive giggling. ‘You can’t say that!’ he nearly wheezed, which only made John feel more comfortable about laughing about his own joke. Brian soon gave up his composure as well, and they both giggled and laughed loudly enough to attract the attention of the otherwise so loud Freddie and Roger, who were obviously wondering what on earth they were going on about. Brian was happy that there were bookcases that separated Freddie and Roger from John and him, and shielded much of the image of them from the eyes of their friends, because he had no idea how they would have recovered from this awful joke at Freddie’s expense if he had seen them laughing about the book and demanded to see it himself.

Still, it seemed that Freddie had made out the pair of them were laughing about him. ‘Did I hear my name?’ he inquired more than a bit suspiciously. Brian, with his eyes wide open and his hand clasped in front of his mouth, looked at John in shock. John, however, seemed calm as ever, and turned to work on the shelves again as he answered Freddie with an air of well-played innocence.

‘Not at all. I saw an interesting book on Duke Frederick the Third of Prussia. Perhaps you’re interested?’ he asked, but between the shelves of books Brian saw Freddie pulling a face and diving back into the novels. When he knew they were safe again, Brian nodded at John, and sighed in relief.

‘That was a good catch,’ he whispered. ‘I really thought he was gonna figure us out right there.’

‘No worries,’ John said. ‘After all this time I’m trained at hiding things from people.’ Brian save a smile back at him, unsure if John, with ‘after all this time’, meant all the time he had spent at Queen Mary’s, or all the time his depression had forced him to keep up appearances. Either of these options were a bit disheartening, so Brian decided to move on to the next subject.

‘Where is the book on that man from Prussia? I’ll put it on the history stack if you’ll give it to me.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ John said, and, upon having Brian frown at him, he admitted: ‘I just completely made up that title.’

Brian, the frown still on his face, asked: ‘You did?’

‘I did. I don’t even know where Prussia is, let alone if they have dukes or any other sort of aristocracy,’ John snickered, and Brian, once again, was struck by the quickness of John’s wit. He could be so incredibly clever and inventive at moments, and Brian could not help but smile.

‘You’re not nearly getting enough credit, John,’ he said, and he could swear he saw John give him a bit of a timid smile before he got back to work again. They by now had both sorted out one shelf; and from the tight row of books that had once occupied the space, not more than half remained standing. The rest of it they had all cast aside on account of them not standing in the right cases. Just when Brian was about to ask John whether they would bring the books they had removed over to the right shelves now or wait with this until they had gone over the entire bookcase, Freddie’s voice was audible from the other side of the room, attracting both of their attention even though they did not wish to be distracted by him.

‘See, a book on guitar playing! Something for you, Brian?’ Freddie shouted. Without awaiting a reply from his roommate, he already tossed the book into his direction; it flew right over the row of bookshelves that divided the two pairs of them from each other, and landed against the upper side of the bookcase John and Brian were working on. John was quick enough to fetch the book before it could reach the floor, forever surprising Brian with his alertness.

‘Guitar playing for beginners,’ John read dryly from the cover, before turning back to Freddie. ‘What sort of insult is this to Brian? He’s the best player I’ve ever come across. What on earth should he do with a book teaching the basics?’

Brian felt a bit awkward upon being called the best player John had ever come across, but before he could modestly tell his roommates that although he was no longer a beginner he just as well was not an expert, Freddie had taken the lead of the conversation again.

‘Well, for you, then, Deaky!’ he said, ignoring John’s remark and sounding positive as ever.

Brian had never heard this nickname before, but it seemed to him that it was not new to John, for he did not comment on it and simply responded: ‘I don’t know what I should need this book for, but I’ll put it on the shelves of informational books right here.’ Freddie muttered something along the lines of ‘come on!’ and ‘you should try it sometimes!’, but John had resorted to a new shelf on which the books had been horribly disarranged, and paid no more attention to his roommate. The book was quickly stuffed away between the row of books already present on the shelf, and the topic was dropped - or, that was, the topic was dropped from John’s side.

Brian, on the other hand, could not let go of the topic yet. He knew that John was never inclined to engage in hobbies, such as reading, writing, making music, working out, or whatever the rest of the people around the place did, but he could not imagine that his crush could really occupy himself with staring at the ceiling all day long. There must be something out there to interest him, and Brian had a feeling that this was music - music was, after all, the only activity John paid attention to when they undertook to engage in it. It was the only thing John was willing to look at, listen to, comment on, and do together; and that was all while he was not even playing anything himself. Brian had a feeling that John would enjoy being able to play an instrument, sing, write songs, or do whatever else was out there surrounding making music. He was, after all, the one that got the whole situation rolling when he had presented him with a guitar he had given up all of his points for - which Brian took as a prove that not only John cared about him, but also that he cared about music. John was quiet and did not appreciate disturbance; if he really had not wanted to hear music, he would not have given his roommate a guitar that was to be played within their own dorm room whenever he pleased.

The more he thought of it, the more evidence Brian collected within his own mind that it should be both good for- and agreeable to John to learn and play an instrument and be able to join them, or at least him. They did not need Freddie and Roger around all the time; if John was to learn how to play guitar, they could take his guitar outside, sit on the swings, and share the instrument between the pair of them. The idea of it made Brian warm with excitement, but he had no idea how to propose this plan to John, who had made the book on learning how to play guitar disappear within the mass of the rest of the book as quickly as he could dispose it. The last thing he wanted was to push John into doing something he did not want to do or talk about - but then again, he knew that he could talk about anything he wanted with John. He had been wanting to ask John before, in a private setting instead of with Freddie and Roger buzzing around, if he was really not willing to maybe pick up some instrument sometimes. He had been the one to gift him a guitar, after all; did he really not wish to pick it up and play some tunes himself when they were just with the two of them?’

Brian, deciding that if there ever was going to be a moment when he could best (if one could call it ‘best’) ask John this question, gathered all of his courage and cleared his throat.

‘John?’ he asked quietly.

‘Hmm?’ John hummed to indicate that he was listening. Brian glanced up at his crush but saw that John’s eyes were still focussed on the row of books instead of on him, which Brian in the current situation found a relief.

Brian, by this time focussing on his work rather than on John, asked his friend: ‘So you’re determined not to learn how to play guitar?’

From the corner of his eyes, Brian could see how John paused while he spoke this sentence, the hand which he was using to push a book back into the shelves resting on said book. ‘Pretty much so,’ John answered after a moment of silence. Then, after even a longer pause, he declared: ‘Just like you, I do not see the use in _learning_ how to play anymore.’

Upon hearing John confirming he was not going to learn how to play guitar, nodded in understanding, even though it was a bit of a disappointment. It was only a few seconds later that the meaning of that second sentence - or at least, what he _thought_ to be the meaning of that sentence - dawned on him, and, with his hand still in mid-air, he abruptly turned to look at John.

‘Do you mean…’ he said quietly, and when he saw John look at him with a grin on his face and an almost secretive sparkle in his eyes, Brian could do nothing but cover his mouth in astonishment, let go of whatever book it had been he had been buying himself with, and rise up to John’s level.

‘You… You actually _play?_ ’ he said, voice cracking at the end of the sentence in pure astonishment. It was not until John nodded to confirm that Brian indeed had understood him correctly that he dared to say it out loud. ‘My God, John! I thought you said you didn’t play guitar!’ he said, louder than before, and John was quick to silence him by putting his index finger across his own lips, and press the forefinger of his other hand against Brian’s lips.

‘Shhh,’ he hushed. ‘Don’t let the rest of the bunch know or they’ll never let me go again,’ he said, obviously speaking of Freddie and Roger, who were shouting at each other over some sort of pre-Playboy era nude magazine they had found in the box Roger had opened up, giving the two of them the perfect opportunity to talk of the matter without their interference. ‘But yes, I play. Not guitar, but the bass,’ he owned up. ‘I mean, I can play guitar, but I like the bass better. It’s more of my instrument than the guitar. That was a bit too much in the spotlight for me.’

Brian, nodding in understanding and almost regretting the loss of John’s finger against his lips, was assaulted by a thousand thoughts inside his head. So John did play - he played guitar, or more specifically, bass guitar. It explained exactly why he had been so keen on arranging a guitar for Brian - and Brian, in all honesty, could imagine John playing the bass more than the guitar. The bass was an instrument that was less on the foreground than a guitar - certainly an electric one - tended to be, and often also allowed its player to fade into the distance a bit more. It was totally unlike John to put himself out there, be it based aesthetically, verbally, or musically, and the image of John as a bass player had instantly settled in Brian’s brain as a valid image. Or, that was, as much as he could comprehend the concept of John being a musician on the fly when all this time, his crush had pretended not to be able to play a single note.

‘So you… God, I don’t know what to say! You do play an instrument!’ Brian whispered, pleasantly surprised by this discovery. John, on the other hand, made a weak attempt at not getting Brian all too enthusiastic for the moment.

‘I mean… it’s been a while,’ he told Brian, going back to his task of sorting out books. Continuing in the same soft voice he had been using for a while by now, he said: ‘I haven’t touched a bass since the second I got here, which was more than one and a half years ago.’

‘That doesn’t matter. Once you learn how to play you’ll never unlearn it again,’ Brian said, to which John could not really make any objection.

‘That’s said to be true,’ his friend said coolly - not willing to either confirm or deny the statement. More than that, it seemed to Brian that he was trying to distance himself from the confession he had just made an instance ago. John implying he had probably forgotten how to play bass, and calmly letting the comment about never unlearning music skills slide past him, was all the proof Brian needed to see from his friend to know that he was not all too enthusiastic about him picking up bass playing again, which hit Brian like a brick. It had felt like such a victory to find out that John and him shared the interest of making music, and fantasising about the opportunity of jamming together, that it made him lost heart to hear John bot being up for any of this anymore.

Still, feeling lucky at the moment - and reminding himself that if he would not attempt a shot he would never strike anyway - he cautiously asked John: ‘But the thing is not whether you still can play… the thing is if you still want to. Do you?’

‘Not in the current circumstances,’ John was quick and determined in his reply.

Brian, ever more despondent but also ever-more curious and determined to see if there was anything he could do to convince john to pick up a guitar again sometimes, asked him: ‘Which are?’

‘You know, with Freddie and Roger breathing in my neck and taking three years before they can play twenty seconds of music,’ John said - which could have been a funny remark, but the seriousness of his voice told Brian that it was not meant to be witty. ‘No, see, I like listening to the three of you, but I would not want to be part of it. That’s why I didn’t tell any of you I could play.’

‘Until now,’ Brian remarked. ‘You’re telling it us right now.’

‘I’m telling it _you_ ,’ John corrected him. ‘I was planning on telling it you sometimes. It was just that you got ahead of me,’ he said with a bit of an apologetic look in his yes.

‘Really?’ Brian asked - not because he did not believe John, but because he wondered why John would want him to know if he did not want to play anyway. ‘Because you know I won’t push you into playing if you don’t want to, unlike… you know,’ he said with a nod into the direction of the other two boys. Then, realising that this might have come across a bit conceited, he was quick to add: ‘I mean, that is not to say that you should not tell them, or that they- they will, you know-’

‘It’s fine,’ John laughed, releasing Brian from his suffering. ‘We both know Freddie and Roger can _and_ will push their luck whenever they can,’ he said. Then, picking up again: ‘But what I was meaning to say, I partly told you because I trust you not to push me into playing if I don’t feel like it.’

John stopped his sentence right here, making Brian wonder if he was going to pick up the rest of the sentence or if he had lost the thread of his thoughts right there. When the silence lasted for a bit too long, Brian reminded him: ‘and what is the other part of the reason you told me?’

It turned out that it was not that John had forgotten what he had been wanting to say; it was just that he was still finding his way as to how to go about saying it. He still sounded a bit unprepared to actually say the words out loud when he told Brian: ‘Well, the other part, the main reason why I told you instead of anyone else… you know, because you’re the only one I wouldn’t mind playing with.’

Brian felt more than flattered by hearing this; any social interaction was quite something when it came from someone so secluded as John, and hearing his friend say out loud that he preferred his company over everyone else’s - no, that he was the only one he wanted to play music with, the skill he had so far hidden from everyone at Queen Mary’s. It warmed his heart to hear John say things like these that - be it in his own, cautious way - told him he trusted him and valued his company.

‘You wouldn’t?’ Brian asked softly.

‘No, I wouldn’t mind that. In fact, I’d love to do that sometimes. Just sit down somewhere with the two of us and play guitar. If you’re up for that, of course,’ john added quickly, but he did not sound awkward anymore like he had done before; he was now confident about what he wanted, what he told Brian, and Brian in turn became more confident about answering his crush.

‘Of course I’m up for that. Any time you’d like I’d be ready to jam,’ he said, hoping he did not sound too desperate. If he did, however, it did not turn John away; it rather seemed to connect John closer to him and his likewise desire to play together.

‘Maybe find a spot in our schedules where Freddie and Roger are both out for therapy or medical appointments or the like so we can have the room four ourselves. Or we can go outside with your guitar to jam, of course,’ John proposed. He almost sounded confident and determined about really wanting to pull through with this - which was why it was all the more disappointing to Brian when he crawled back again by saying: ‘Or well, jam… You really should not expect too much from me. It’s been ages, and at the end of the day I’m a bass player, not a guitarist.’

‘I’m sure you’ll do wonderful,’ Brian encouraged him, even though it did not seem to have too much effect on John - in fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect.

‘It’ll probably be terrible, me playing guitar. But we can just have me pluck a few strings and then have you play guitar for the other ninety-five percent of the time. There’s only one guitar after all, and that’s yours entirely. The last thing I want is to deprive an actual musician of his instrument when I’m like a hundred times inferior to literally everything they play.’

Brian wanted to open his mouth and tell John that he had just as much rights - if not more - to play on his guitar, given that it was the instrument he had ‘bought’, not to mention how he should not talk himself down so much, but he had a much better idea in mind. John was a bass player, and probably would not really suit playing a guitar no matter how much he tried it. If Brian really wanted him to be comfortable making music, he should not push his own electric guitar into John’s hands - he should arrange a bass guitar for him in the same manner as John had purchased a guitar for him. That was what he needed, that was what he deserved - that was what Brian wanted to do to show John how much he cared about him and him being comfortable around this hell of a place.

One more look at John, who Brian saw looking at the ‘learn how to play guitar’-book a bit despondently before placing other books next to it, solidified his intentions: he was going to arrange a bass guitar for John.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: The DSM listed homosexuality as a mental disorder until the year of 1973. I quote hereby: ‘In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed homosexuality to be a mental disorder. 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain it. The APA then compromised, removing homosexuality from the DSM but replacing it, in effect, with "sexual orientation disturbance" for people "in conflict with" their sexual orientation. Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM.’ (source: psychologytoday.com)


	10. Part Ten

Whether it had been nerves or excitement or the fact that he had not thought of it for ages was something Brian did not know, but one of these - or a combination of multiple factors - he deemed to be the cause of him having to ask the receptionist to look up his parents’ phone number in order to ring them up. He felt so silly for having forgotten the number; he had successfully been taught to recite it by heart at the age of six by his overprotective mother, but while he had been able to regurgitate it for seventeen years without any problems, it apparently only took little over a month for him to forget it again.

Even sillier he felt when his hands were shaking as he dialled the number he had been given by the receptionist, of whom he was positive must be raising an eyebrow at him at the moment from her place behind the desk. Brian had been happy enough to find that it was not Miss Meyer but another woman at the reception, but still he felt more than mildly awkward when he saw her watching him repeatedly shake his left hand to stop it from trembling. He was more nervous than he could have foreseen he was going to be, and he did not know exactly why. He never had been fond of making phone calls, but why should he feel so awkward calling his own parents? Perhaps it was the fact that he had not been permitted to see or hear a thing from them since over a month, or because he did not know if they were going to pick up the phone. Given that there was only one phone booth, to be used by everyone in the entire building, he had been given ten minutes from start to finish, regardless of what needed to be discussed or how quickly the other side picked up the phone. He kept the possibility in mind that the phone might not be answered at all; it was half past one in the afternoon, and chances were that his mother was out shopping, visiting family, vacuuming upstairs, or working in the garden. Even if she was at home and heard the phone ringing, there still was a chance she would not take the call - she always had been suspicious of phone calls when she was not expecting one, and if her husband was not at home, Brian knew she was prone to just let it go. He knew for a fact that his father was at work - as he always was at this point in time on a regular weekday - and that there was a bigger chance of him not being answered than the opposite. For this reason, he held his fingers crossed while he dialled the last digit of the number, and closed his eyes while he waited as the familiar beeping sound of the phone occupying the line sounded in his ear.

Brian felt his heart starting to beat faster while he counted the number of times the phone rang. The first few times he was still hopeful, but when after five or six counts there was still no sign of presence at the other side of the line, he started to become more doubtful than he had previously allowed himself to be. He swallowed a bit painfully during the seventh dialling sound, and at number eight he nervously glanced at the receptionist, whom he noticed was still glancing at him.

‘Come on,’ Brian whispered under his breath, nervously biting down his bottom lip. He knew chances of his mother picking up after this long of waiting were nearly impossible, but he could not let go of the phone yet. It was the first time he had gotten the opportunity to be in touch with his parents since he had been dumped at this place, and even though he still did not appreciate or comprehend their decision of leaving him here, he had gotten over his initial anger and resentment and wanted to speak to them again. All he wanted was just to hear the voice of his mother for these ten minutes - or whatever was left of it - just to make sure his parents were still out there, still loved him despite everything they had gone through, still saw them as their child. Even though he knew his mother not picking up the phone had nothing to do with her maternal love for him (she might not even be at home, for all he knew), Brian could not help feeling as if she did not _want_ him anymore. He knew it was irrational, completely irrational, but he could not throw the thought out of his mind-

‘Hello?’

Brian had been so occupied in his own thoughts that he was nearly startled when a voice called out to him from the other side of the line. He was, however, soon relieved to find the soft, female voice belonging to his mother, and he felt his throat growing heavy upon answering her.

‘Mum?’ he asked with an audible difficulty that would have made him feel awkward if he had been speaking to anyone else than his mother. Now, however, he felt no shame in it - not when his mother reacted with even more strain than he had done.

‘Brian? Darling, is that you?’ she asked as if she could hardly believe it. Brian could not blame her; he himself could barely believe he was finally talking to his mother - or anyone from outside of the clinic, for that matter - either.

‘Yes, mum, it’s me,’ Brian answered with a heavy throat.

‘Oh, my darling!’ his mother exclaimed, so loudly that Brian involuntarily removed the telephone from its position against its ear. He did not mind his mother shouting out of surprise and happiness to hear his voice again, but he preferred not to have his ears permanently damaged by the high-pitched sound of her voice that continued to pour from the other side of the line.

‘Brian, my dear, is that really you?!’ he heard his mother ask, nearly begging for confirmation, and he was glad he could give it to her.

‘Yes, it’s really me, mum,’ he said, after which he removed the telephone from his ear again. He expected her to fall back into screaming again, but no loud voice followed - in fact, all he heard was a soft sobbing emerging from her side of the line, and he felt his heart sinking in. He had never been able to stand hearing his mother cry, especially not if he knew he was the cause of it, and he was quick to reach out to her.

‘Mum, are you alright?’ he asked softly.

‘Yes,’ she was quick to reply, ‘I’m… yes,’ she managed, before her voice was overtaken by sobs again. Brian opened his mouth to say something, but the sobbing of his mother changed to crying, and he was afraid she would not hear a word of what he was going to say to her anyway. He therefore waited for a moment until her crying had subsided a bit again before he picked up the conversation.

‘Don’t cry, mum, everything’s fine,’ Brian told her softly. Not knowing what more to tell her to convince her he was doing alright, he repeated twice that everything was fine in the most soothing voice he could produce now that he felt a lump growing in his own throat as well. He had not really allowed himself to think of it too much, but he missed his mother; probably more than anyone else from the world outside Queen Mary’s. He missed the way she would ruffle his hair and press a kiss on his cheek each morning when he sat down for breakfast, the way she would ask him about his plans for the day before he left for school each day. He missed her bringing him tea in his room when he was studying in the evening, and the way she would tell him to lay down his work after ten o’clock. He even missed her telling him to be careful each morning when he walked out the door to go to school, and asking him if he had taken the lunch she had packed for him out of the fridge and put it into his bag, and asking him if he had the house keys with him even though she would always be at home waiting for him when he returned. Although he had been bothered by her protectiveness, especially in the depth of his depression, he now realised he missed the feeling of knowing someone was looking after him. Of course, he had found safety and comfort in his roommates - mainly in John - but it was not the same as the presence of his mother.

‘I know,’ his mother sniffed. ‘It’s just… I didn’t think I would hear your voice again so soon!’ she told him, sounding both very happy and very emotionally overwhelmed at the same time. Brian smiled a bit to himself, not knowing how to answer to this immediately. He came up with something to say after a handful of seconds of silence, but just when he opened his mouth, his mother did so, too.

‘Oh, and that you should just call now that your dad is at work!’ she exclaimed, sounding suddenly very troubled that her husband was not there to have a chance to speak to their son as well. Brian did not have the heart to tell his mother that he actually found it a relief to hear that she was home alone at the moment. It was not that he did not want to speak to his father, but it was already a lot for him to finally talk to his mother again. Having both of his parents fight over the telephone during the whatever amount of minutes still left of the phone call, would not have contributed greatly to the conversation, Brian feared.

‘I’m sorry, the telephone had been booked completely. And when I heard that I was allowed to call you today, I didn’t want to put it off,’ he told her, even though this was not entirely the truth. While Brian had been excited to hear he had made enough progress to make a phone call, he had not been in a hurry to call his parents right away. In fact, the main reason that had gotten him excited about the fact that he was allowed to telephone was not that he could finally be back in touch with the world outside Queen Mary’s, but that this unmistakeably meant he had earned himself some points he could very well use for the bass guitar he was trying to arrange for John. It had been Freddie who had convinced him to ring up his mother - something Brian was thankful for now, because even though he had been nervous as could be, it still felt very good to finally hear her again.

‘I see, I see, you don’t have to apologise for anything,’ his mother told him hastily. ‘It’s just that I’m sure your dad would have loved to talk to you, too, for a moment! Your father and I miss you so much, dear! Everything is so quiet at home without you, and I can’t get used to it. I keep setting up the breakfast table for three people, and make three cups of tea in the evening. I even packed your lunch for school a few days ago, can you imagine?’

Brian smiled, but was again not too sure how to reply. He felt bad for his mother that she was so caught up with his absence, but the image of her making lunch for him while he had not been at home for over a month, was too much for him not to smile at.

‘And your grandmother came by yesterday, together with aunt Annie. Of course they asked me  how you were doing, and if you were making progress,’ his mother continued. ‘And it felt terrible to not be able to say a thing about it! We aren’t being told anything! Even Dr. Sumner hasn’t told us anything, can you believe that?’

Unlike his mother, Brian could very well believe that - and, on top of that, was very happy that his former psychiatrist had not reached out to his parents. If he had, it would have meant that Sarah, John, Ariel, Nolan, or whoever else was involved in his healing process , would be exchanging his current medical information with the man he was so glad to be rid of. He knew however that his mother still felt very obliged to Sumner for the ‘help’ he had given her son, and, not feeling like wasting the five minutes or so they had left on the phone on quarrelling about his previous doctor, Brian decided not to dwell on that subject.

‘I know, mum. It’s probably patient privacy policy or something the like,’ Brian told her.

‘You’re probably right,’ Ruth sighed. ‘You’re an adult, after all. But it’s so hard as a mother to sit around all day not knowing how her son is going on, whether he’s twenty-four or not!’ she said, and Brian felt his cheeks colour a bit at his mother’s eternal habit of sheltering him. ‘But enough about that now. Please tell me how you are doing! How is your new therapist? How often do you have sessions? And are you in touch with that nice young man we met that day? Noah, or Noel or so…’

‘Nolan,’ Brian corrected her patiently. ‘He’s my mentor, so I get to see him quite often. He sometimes drops by in group therapy-’

‘Group therapy!’ his mother repeated. ‘That sounds like a brilliant idea! Do you have a group of people with similar disease- disorders, I mean?’

‘Well, it’s a therapy group for people with depression. I, eh, haven’t found anyone else with borderline around the place,’ Brian admitted.

‘That’s understandable. It’s a completely new diagnosis, after all,’ his mother said - something Brian wished people would stop reminding him of all the time. Luckily, they soon moved on. ‘And how is your room, by the way? Do you have a comfortable bed? And I do hope you have a window facing outside. Sunlight is very important when you’re feeling down. Your father just read a very interesting article about that in the newspaper the other day,’ his mother blabbered on, exactly as Brian was used to from her.

‘Yes, we have a window,’ he comforted her before she would go off to search said newspaper article and read it out loud to him. However, the five-word-response Brian thought could not in any way be taken offence against, still turned out to be controversial to his mother.

‘We? Who are we?’ she asked, sounding somewhat suspicious.

‘My roommates and me.’

‘Roommates! No private rooms, then?’ his mother asked.

‘No, no private rooms. It’s not exactly a hotel here,’ Brian said, which he felt like was just about the understatement of the century. He was not planning to give his mother any of the details about the fights, the drugs, the weapons, the bullying, the suicide of a fellow patient, the alleged sexual assault of one of his therapists, and whatever other incidents he had seen over the span of the last month. She seemed to be barely holding out without him as it was; if she was to hear that her son had been cut in the face with a knife by a fellow patient who would go on to drive one of the people he bullied into suicide, she would either never sleep again, or would drive up to Queen Mary’s and kick in the door to personally release Brian from the place.

‘Well, at least it’s also not jail, right?’ his mother laughed, but Brian felt as if someone had ripped his heart out by hearing this comparison. ‘But do tell me about your roommates! With how many people do you share a room with? Are they nice? You do talk to them, right?’

‘I have three roommates. Freddie, Roger, and John, and they’re very nice. I talk to them a lot. Especially to John,’ Brian said, unable to oppress the smile that tugged at the corners of his lips. He could not help smiling whenever he saw John, thought of him, or even mentioned his name to someone who did not even know him. He was more head over heels for John than he ever could have imagined himself to be about anyone, yet here he was, smiling like an idiot upon even pronouncing the name of his crush out loud. He decided not to let his mother in on his secret, though - she would probably fall off her chair if she heard he had lost his heart to a boy, and besides, Brian did not think it appropriate to mention his first real love through the telephone booth of a psychiatric institution. He would share all his thoughts and feelings regarding John with the diary Sarah had instructed him to keep, and with nothing and no one else as it was.

‘Very good, my dear. I’m glad to hear you’re talking to other people. You did not seem to do that too much the last couple of months you lived with us,’ his mother recalled. ‘You seem to do so much better than before.’

‘I think I am doing better than before. The first few days were… _tough_ ,’ Brian said, only just managing to hold himself back from saying ‘terrible’ and having his mother freak out again. ‘But I’ve gotten used to life here, I think.’

‘I knew you would. Your father and me are so proud of you, darling,’ his mother said, and Brian could hear she was getting emotional again. ‘And knowing you’re doing well is making it a bit easier to… to live without you,’ she added, after which Brian could hear her starting to sob again.

‘It’s alright, mum. You don’t have to worry about me in here. I’m doing much better than I did when I was back home,’ he comforted her, deciding not to add that this was more because of his meeting John and no longer having to deal with Dr. Sumner, than as a result of the psychiatric efforts the staff of Queen Mary’s was making for its patients.

Brian was brought back to reality by the appearance of another guy into the reception room - someone he did not know but of whom he was pretty sure was next in line for the telephone. He looked up at the timer next to him on the table, and to his surprise saw that little more than a minute of his time was remaining. He had expected that ten minutes of phone time would be gone before he knew it, but that it would fly as quickly as it had done, was something he had not foreseen.

‘Mum, I’m looking at the timer here, and the last minute just went in,’ Brian told his mother, who audibly gasped upon hearing this news. ‘So I’m afraid we’re going to have to cut it off soon.’

‘You’re right, you’re right. You probably have things to do, don’t you?’ his mother asked.

‘I’m going to help out in the laundry room at two,’ Brian told his mother.

‘Really?’ his mother asked, sounding pleasantly surprised. ‘Darling, how unbelievable! I didn’t even know you could fold a sock!’

‘Of course I can, mum,’ Brian said, rolling his eyes to himself. ‘I know how to deal with laundry.’

‘Well, I’d love to see that when you get home!’ Ruth laughed. ‘No, darling, I’m just teasing you. I’m very proud of you for taking up responsibilities of community life.’

‘Thank you, mum,’ Brian said, not adding the fact that it was not his responsibility to communal life that had made him pick up chores, but the fact that he could very well use the points one would get for volunteering for the bass guitar he was trying to arrange for John. ‘I’ll call you as soon as they’ll allow me, alright?’

‘Please do. And please, if you get the chance, call somewhere after five. Your father will want to talk to you, too.’

‘I will try my best,’ Brian promised his mother. ‘I’ll talk to you soon, mum.’

‘I’ll wait for your call,’ his mother said hopefully. ‘I love you, darling.’

‘I love you too, mum,’ Brian whispered. It was something he was not used to saying to anyone, really - but even though it felt weird, it did feel good to finally speak the words that he had had on his mind for a while now. Living away from his parents definitely had made him appreciate all they did for him, especially all his mother did. So even though in the depth of his depression he had often wished for them to disappear out of his life and never come back again, he now realised how much he owed to them and how much he loved them despite his fluctuating moods.

‘Wait!’ his mother exclaimed, just when Brian wanted to say one more goodbye. ‘I forgot to ask you about the food! You are eating well enough, I hope, even if the meals aren’t too good? You always used to be a picky eater, and were always so skinny! I’ve worried so much over your eating habits ever since you were a toddler…’

Brian, feeling more than a little embarrassed when his mother brought up this eternal subject, had to hide his slight annoyance in her calling out to him to tell him to eat his vegetables and the like. ‘Yes, mum, will do.’

‘Alright then. And don’t forget to-’

What his mother did not want him to forget, was something Brian feared he was never going to find out, or at least not until the next time he would get to speak to her on the phone. The moment his mother had wanted to bring yet something else to his attention, the ten minutes had passed, and the line had been cut off mid-sentence. Brian remained in the telephone booth for a few seconds, slowly bringing the phone down from his ear to his neck, and sighing deeply. He had mixed feelings about the phone call; on the one side it felt good to hear the voice of his mother again, and to be able to relieve the stress she unmistakably felt about her only son having moved out of their house to enter a psychiatric clinic. On the other side, it was painful to be reminded of the existence of the world outside of Queen Mary’s. While in here, one adapted a new life, a new schedule, new daily activities, all of which would drop away around you when you would be allowed to leave. It was a different world in here; it completely stood apart from the one outsiders lived, and though Brian did not wish to live in here for all too long, he also could not imagine adapting to his old life again. Going back home, continue his university degree, hanging out with the people that might have forgotten him during his absence for all he knew… It did not sound like an attractive opportunity to Brian either.

‘Eh, can I go now?’

Brian looked up to see a boy, probably not much old than eighteen or nineteen, standing at the other side of the glass wall. It took him a few seconds to realise that this was the person who had entered the room two minutes or so ago, and who was eagerly waiting for his turn to contact the outside world for a mere ten minutes, just like he had done moments before.

‘Oh. Yes, of course you can,’ Brian said, quickly stepping aside and leaving the phone booth for the boy who was next up. He avoid the gaze of both the guy and the receptionist when he fled into the hallway again, not feeling like looking at anyone after just having confronted himself with the reality that the world outside Queen Mary’s was moving on without him. If it had been up to him, he would have preferred not to face anyone for the rest of the afternoon, and lock himself up in the dorm room with a book or his guitar or whatever else he could find to shut himself out from the rest of Queen Mary’s population. Unfortunately for him, he had signed up to help out at the laundry room days ago, and knew he could not back out of it ten minutes before he was supposed to show up. Besides, how was he ever going to score enough points for John’s bass guitar if he did not volunteer at places?

For this reason, Brian averted his eyes when he crossed some of his therapy group mates, ignored the opportunity to stalk upstairs towards the dorm rooms, and followed his way through the hallway towards the laundry room in the back of the building. The first time he had signed up to help out at the place, it had been quite a struggle to find the way to the room Nolan had only showed him once before. Freddie had been so kind to insist on picking up his laundry for him each week, which meant that Brian had never really been there before that week - but now that he helped out nearly every day, he could blindly find his way to the laundry room. Normally he would storm right through the door and enthusiastically get to whatever task it was that they had laid out for him, but today, he halted at the door and waited there for a few minutes, thinking over the conversation he had just had, and the life he was currently leading in general. How long would it be before he would be able to speak to his parents again? And when would he be allowed to see them in person? He knew from Freddie and Roger  that there was a visiting room, had even seen both of them go down to visit their family once or twice, but he had no idea when he would be informed that he could invite people over to see him. Then again, if he was allowed to, would he want to? Would he want his parents to come visit him in this pretty awful place, in a prison-like visiting area with guards in every corner of the room, just now that they had gotten the impression that things were fine here?

Assuming that it must almost be two, Brian put all of his thoughts out of his head, placed his hand on the doorknob, and pushed open the door to the laundry facility. It was warm in there, as it usually was, but this time not by the large amount of people crammed in a somewhat too small space, but solely because of the numerous hot irons two people were working at. Apart from this, nothing seemed to be done; no one was folding, sorting out, loading or unloading the washing machines, putting laundry into the lockers, or anything the like; apart from the two people working on these tasks, the room was entirely empty.

‘Hi,’ Brian said a bit comprehensively, wondering where on earth the rest of the group was. The two men mumbled something in reply, and it was not until Jeff, the staff member who supervised the laundry facilities, jumped up from behind a row of washing machines that Brian was given a proper welcome into the room.

‘Brian, I’m so glad you’re here! I almost thought you weren’t going to show up.’

‘Sorry, I was on the phone before I got over here,’ Brian said, which he figured was only half a lie.

‘It’s okay,’ Jeff was quick to say. ‘But we’re very short-staffed today. Dan and Michael called in ill, and out of the four people who volunteered, you’re the only one who showed up,’ he said, and Brian felt bad for Jeff, who seemed obviously stressed out. ‘And on top of that, two of the washing machines stopped working two hours ago, and I still haven’t managed to but them back to functioning again.’

‘That sounds… unfortunate,’ Brian said with a glance at the two washing machines that were the only ones not to spin around. ‘Have you called in an electrician yet.’

‘I wish I could,’ Jeff said. ‘But we don’t have the budget for it. So I guess I’ll try to rearranges some buttons and wires again to see if that works.’

Brian was a bit sceptical, considering that Jeff probably had been doing this since the last two hours without any effect. ‘And what if you can’t fix it by yourself?’

‘Well, then I guess we’ll have to deal with three washing machines instead of five for the upcoming years,’ Jeff shrugged it off, but Brian could detect the frustration in his voice. It had taken him no more than one hour of volunteering in the laundry room to find out that washing clothes, towels, bedlinen, and whatever more pieces of fabric both staff and patients used, was a quite a hassle when one had no more than five regular household washing machines. The idea of having to get the same amount of laundry done for over two hundred people with three washing machines, was not an inviting one.

‘Either way, Cliff and Brandon are ironing all we’ve been able to wash with three machines, but the clothes still need to be sorted out. Can you take care of that?’

‘Sure,’ Brian nodded. He had sorted out laundry before, and did not mind it too much; all the clothes had been tagged with either water resistant marker or with sewn-in labels containing the patients’ lockers. Each patient had been assigned a locker - his number was 173 - and was free to come pick up laundry whenever the service was open. Officially laundry that was brought in before five o’clock should be clean at five the day after, but with the lack of staff, order, and at the moment even lack of working washing machines, it was not unusual to have a three day waiting list on the laundry services, if not longer.

‘The clothes have been folded. All you need to do is sort them out,’ Jeff told him, before he disappeared behind the non-functioning washing machines again. Brian picked up the first stack of unsorted laundry, knelt down in front of the lockers, and started picking out the shirts, trousers, socks, bed linens, and whatever more it was out. The work was somewhat tedious and he did not exactly enjoy checking the labels on the inside of unknown people’s underwear, but it allowed him to get his mind of the matter of his parents for a moment. The endless half-unfolding, checking, throwing clothes inside lockers, and getting down to repeat this process a hundred times made time pass faster than he could have imagined, and before Brian knew it, the two hours of voluntary work he had signed up for had passed.

He could tell by the somewhat pleading look on Jeff’s face that he wished he would stay a bit longer, and though Brian found it hard to disappoint him (or anyone at all, for that matter), he was able to leave the laundry room without feeling all too guilty. He had done his job for the day; he now wanted to go to the dorm room and sit on his bed to read, write, or play guitar for the remaining time until dinner would be served at six.

The service room left behind him, Brian made his way back to the main hallway and trod upstairs. He was happy to be able to return to his dorm room; he knew John was at his psychiatrist and would thus be out, but Roger  and Freddie would probably be in. He would not mind seeing them now; they could play some music, and he had been wanting to catch the couple without John so he could discuss his plans of arranging a bass guitar for John with them. He had not known John for all too long, had no idea how many points for volunteer work would equal a bass guitar, or even what exactly made a perfect bass guitar for their roommate. Admitted, Brian knew he was the one who talked to John most, and assumed that Freddie and Roger  were not even aware of the fact that John could play, let alone what sort of bass guitar would fit him best. Still, Brian felt like discussing the matter with other people - just anyone apart from the person for whom the surprise was intended - would be good for him to find out what he should arrange, how he should arrange it, and how many hours of volunteer work and other acts of perfect behaviour he would be looking at to get the job done.

While walking up to room 41B, he wondered how he was going to bring the news of John’s musical abilities to the rest of their roommates. As far as Brian was concerned, Freddie and Roger  were unaware of John’s secret hobby - and more than that, John did not seem at all willing to have them know. When he had disclosed his talents to Brian in the library more than a week ago, he had urged Brian to keep the news quiet and not share it with their roommates. Brian therefore felt a bit guilty for letting the other couple in on the knowledge, but he needed someone to talk to about his plans, and from the handful of people he knew at this place, Freddie and Roger  seemed like the best options around if he did not want to call out to either staff members or distant acquaintances he’d met at group therapy. Freddie and Roger  could be loud and obnoxious at times, but Brian knew for a fact that if he urged the two to keep the information about John’s musical talents to themselves, they would stay true to their word. On top of that, they would probably be in on his plan as well; they all unanimously seemed to agree that it was about time John would pick up a hobby other than staring at the wall. Brian was determined he was going to let Freddie and Roger  in on his secret plans; the only thing he needed to figure out was how to tell them without getting them (mainly Freddie) too hyped up about the plan and making sure he would not spoil the surprise for John before he would manage to fetch him a bass guitar.

Still wondering how exactly he would tackle the matter, Brian halted in front of the door of his dorm room. He pulled the key out of his back pocket, inserted it into the lock, and turned it around.

Brian was unsure if there was anyone in he room when he entered; he knew for a fact that John should be out, but although he hoped Freddie and Roger would be present, he could not tell for sure. They were not the most sociable beings on the planet in the sense of hanging out with people besides their roommates; they could talk to each other day and night, but they did not tend to go out and interact with people in the activity room or the like. If they went out, it usually was either to the sitting room on Friday evening to listen to the latest hits being played uninterrupted by advertisements or radio personnel, or to the gymnasium for Freddie’s daily workouts. Apart from these moments, they would mostly stay inside their room, and Brian had a feeling that this was not just because they preferred to, but because not everyone at the clinic took to gay people too kindly. The whispers, the slurs, the pushes in the hallway, and the dirty looks of people avoiding their vicinity did not go unnoticed. It was often quick and subtle, too subtle for him to stand up for his roommates, but Brian could totally understand why it would make Freddie and Roger  feel better to spend time together in places where they could be sure no unpleasant people would get into their space.

It therefore did not surprise Brian that, upon entering the room, he found Freddie and Roger  sitting close to each other talking about one matter or the other. The only thing that struck him as unusual was that they were sitting on his bed instead of their own, and that their conversation topic seemed to be a flat sort of book Freddie was holding in his lap, while Brian could not remember that either of them tended to read a lot.

‘Look, I _told_ you he likes him beyond that,’ Brian heard either of the two say to the other, before the sound of him stepping into the room seemed to attract their attention.

‘Hi, guys,’ Brian greeted his roommates, who looked at him as if they had never seen a human being before in their lives.

‘Brian!’ Freddie said - exclaimed, rather - while staring at him nearly painfully, his eyes travelling between his boyfriend and the person who had just walked into the room.

‘Something wrong?’ Brian asked him, having to oppress the tendency to cock one eyebrow.

‘Of course not,’ Freddie said quickly, putting both his hands over the notebook in his lap. ‘We just didn’t expect you back so soon.’

‘I told Jeff I wasn’t staying at the laundry room longer today,’ Brian answered. ‘He seemed not to be too happy about it, but there wasn’t too much he could do about it either.’

‘Can you close the door behind you?’ Roger  suddenly asked him without reacting to the answer Brian had given to Freddie, which made him all the more suspicious that his roommates were doing something they both knew they should not be doing.

‘Eh, sure, I was just about to,’ Brian said, sounding a bit sceptic. Still, he turned around and did as he was asked; however, this he did not without making sure he would be capable still of seeing what his roommates were up to. While turning around to close the door, Brian watched the couple from the corners of his eyes, and though he could not see exactly what they did, he got the general idea of it. He could swear he saw Roger  frantically search around for a place to put the book, after which it was taken out of his hands by Freddie, who stuffed it underneath the pillow he was sitting next to. Knowing for sure by now that  something was going on that they intended to keep him oblivious to, he was quick to close the door and turn around again to face the overly innocent looking boys.

‘What were you doing?’ Brian asked in an as neutral sounding voice he could possibly produce.

‘Nothing,’ Freddie said a bit too quickly to sound credible.

‘Weren’t you reading something?’ Brian reminded him.

‘Reading? What makes you think so?’ Roger  asked, and Brian chewed on the inside of his cheek. So _this_ was how they wanted to play this game.

‘I literally just saw Freddie holding a book in his lap, if I’m not mistaken,’ he reminded them.

‘Oh, that was just my sketchbook!’ Freddie said, sounding relieved to have come up with an excuse of some kind.

‘Oh, I didn’t know you drew!’ Brian said, feigning enthusiasm. ‘Can I see it, too?’

Glances were exchanged between Roger  and Freddie, before the latter said: ‘Oh, it’s nothing special.’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’d still like to see it,’ Brian said. Freddie and Roger  looked at each other with visible tension, and if he had not been sure of it before, Brian now was absolutely positive there was something they were hiding from him - and it was about time he got the word out of them. ‘What’s going on here? I don’t wish to be rude, but you’re sitting on my bed acting all suspiciously without being able to give me any explanation,’ Brian said in a voice that sounded much more confident than how he felt on the inside. He had to put his hand in the pocket of his trousers to ensure his roommates would not be able to see how it trembled in fear of speaking up against them. Brian realised all too well that he was the newest one in this group, that he should be happy to have found companions in his roommates, and mostly that he should not ruin the friendship between them over something trivial. It seemed that his insecurity forced him to find out what his roommates were trying to hide from him, whether he felt comfortable about putting himself out there or not.

It was only when he started considering whether it was worth stepping up and demanding Freddie and Roger  to tell him what they thought they were doing that Brian noticed the remarkably empty spot on his nightstand - it was then that all the previously unattached pieces of the puzzle fell into their place.

‘Where’s my notebook?’ Brian asked quietly yet straightforwardly, and he could swear that at the mentioning of the word ‘notebook’, Roger  tensed up, and Freddie pressed the object he was trying to hide from him further away beneath the pillow.

‘What notebook?’ Freddie asked coyly, but Brian was not buying it.

‘The notebook I keep on my nightstand. The one it seems like you’re currently trying to shove under my pillow,’ Brian accused him. He could feel his cheeks growing red; just the thought of the things they might have read in his diary were too embarrassing for him to deal with. What if they read how afraid he was in this place, what if they read how he had spent sleepless nights wishing to be back home? Worse than all this, what if they read the letter Sarah had told him to write to John, in which he explained his feelings for him? What if Freddie and Roger would find out he was head over heels for their deeply depressed, socially withdrawn roommate?

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Freddie said, but the more he spoke, the less Brian believed a word he said.

‘Let me clarify it for you, then,’ Brian said a lot braver than he felt. ‘Have you been going through my notebook? The one I keep for my psychiatry sessions?’ he asked in a louder voice this time.

It was then that Freddie started to give in. ‘Look, we did not mean to read your-‘ Freddie started, but he needed not finish his sentence. Brian already knew it was heading towards some sad kind of excuse of an apology that he did not wish to hear, so he broke Freddie off before he could finish.

‘You did not mean to read my diary, but you still did?’ Brian asked coldly as he strode forwards. Roger  crawled back on the bed as to distance himself from Brian, but Freddie stayed perfectly in place with a coy look on his face which Brian wished he could wipe right off. Even when Brian stepped in closer and practically towered right over him, Freddie did not budge; in fact, it was him who trembled as he reached out his hand to ask his diary back, while Freddie looked at him with an air of perfect calm, as if nothing was going on.

‘Give it back,’ Brian whispered dangerously, but not dangerously enough to make Freddie comply.

‘Listen, you have to understand that we were just-’

‘No, I don’t need to listen. You need to give back what’s mine!’ Brian told him, which at last seemed to have an effect on Freddie. His roommate slowly drew the book from underneath the pillow he had tried to hide it under, but he did not quite give it to Brian yet.

‘Promise me not to be mad,’ Freddie said with a most serious look in his eyes. The request almost would have made Brian laugh if he had not been so close to either screaming or crying as he was at the given moment.

‘You are not the one to make the demands right now,’ Brian told him more emotionally than he had intended to do. ‘You can’t be the one to fuck someone over and then blame them for not taking it well,’ he said in stronger language than he had known himself to be capable of.

‘Please don’t be like this, Brian,’ Freddie said in a voice that reminded Brian of too many past situations he longed to forget. _Please don’t be like this. Stop exaggerating. Why can’t you just react normally for once? Why do you always have to be like this?_ He had heard everyone around him saying it to him some time or another; his friends, his teachers, his father, his psychiatrist, to the point where he was starting to ask it himself with every single emotion he felt. But he was not going to take it this time. He was not going to allow anyone to make him feel guilty for putting them right on something a six year-old could tell was a wrong thing to do.

‘ _I_ should not be like this?’ Brian asked, feeling tears welling up in his eyes by now. ‘I should not be like this? You were the one to go through my personal belongings and read my diary, and now you’re telling me I don’t have a right to be angry? I should be reasonable when you… when you’re the exact opposite?’ he said, after which he cut off his voice.

‘Oh, Brian…’ Freddie said with a look of compassion in his eyes, which almost made Brian give in if he hadn’t been so completely embarrassed and indignant by the event of finding out the couple had been going over all of the inner thoughts he had penned down during the past weeks. ‘Darling, I’m sorry. _We_ are sorry. Come on, sit down and we’ll talk it over.’ Freddie patted the space on the mattress next to him, but Brian was determined not to give in. The last thing he wanted right now was to sit down and talk it over; he was angry, he was upset, and he was going to let people know.

‘I don’t want to talk it over! I trusted you, and you…’ Brian felt his voice drop and did not dare pick it up again out of fear of breaking down for real. Freddie seemed to notice the decline in his mental state, too, for he put the notebook aside to the mattress, and started to approach him.

‘Brian…’ he heard Freddie call out his name, and saw him shakily stand up from the bed. ‘Dear, we’re so sorry. Please, listen to me-’ It was when Freddie, along with these words, reached out a hand to put on Brian’s forearm, that Brian took a firm step back to let him know that any attempts at reconciliation were not appreciated at the moment.

‘Don’t ‘dear’ me, and don’t touch me,’ Brian told him, involuntarily taking another step back to make sure the message got across.

‘Then what do you want me to do?’ Freddie said, a nearly begging tinge to his voice. ‘Just tell me what you want me to do to make up with you. Please,’ he added with the saddest expression Brian had seen since quite a while, but he was determined not to fall for it.

‘Just…’ Brian started off, but he did not know what he wanted himself, and resorted to closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘I don’t know. I don’t want you near me right now.’

‘But Brian…’ Freddie said with a cautious step forwards.

‘Just leave me alone, will you?!’ Brian spat out violently enough to make Freddie halt his movements and simply stare at him instead. He was quiet for a moment, which gave Brian the time to both think and speak. ‘Don’t come near me. I need to be alone for… for a moment,’ he said somewhat incoherently, as if he was not too sure of it himself. Maybe this was one of those moments where he should not lock himself out, but where he should let people in, allow Freddie and Roger  to apologise, and talk things over - but he simply could not put himself to do it. Despite what his psychiatrist would tell him would be the right thing to do in the current situation, he had to leave and get some air. Some time away from the people who had ruined his trust.

Spinning around on his heel and reaching out for the door handle, Brian was interrupted in his intentions by Roger.

‘But we don’t want you to hurt yourself!’ Roger  suddenly blurted out from his corner of the bed. It surprised Brian a bit that this was their first concern, especially since he had never openly spoken about his self-harming past with any other patient other than John. The realisation that they must have read about his tendencies in the diary they had snatched from him, however, made Brian’s anger boil up again. He had no intentions of cutting or scratching or whatever else at the moment, but he did not feel like comforting Freddie and Roger  with this knowledge. They had made him suffer, and Brian did not at all feel bad for letting them well in guilt and fear at the moment.

‘You should have thought about that before you decided to read my diary,’ Brian said as he pulled the door open, and without giving one more look into the direction of his roommates, he slammed it shut behind him.

It was only when he had left the room that Brian noticed how his heart was racing and how sweat had started to pearl at his temples as a result of the stress he had pulled himself through by speaking up against his roommates. He did not, however, get much time to come back to himself; he heard the strained voices and stumbling movements of Freddie and Roger  at the other ide of the wall, and knew that he had to get away as fast as possible before they would storm out and come after him. Despite him having made it rather clear he did not want their company at the moment, he had a feeling that they would ignore his wishes and chase after him to make sure he would not run off and hurt himself somewhere in a dark corner of this hell place.

Without doing more than taking in one breath of air, Brian sprinted down the hallway of the first floor, around the corner, and ran towards the folding doors that lead to the stairs that would escort him to the first floor, away from the dormitories. In his hurry, he almost ran into someone who just opened the door of their bedroom, and nearly bumped into a guy he only later realised was Nolan, but he refused to slow down. He had to get away from this place, away from Freddie and Roger , of whom he was not sure if they were following him but for whom he also did not want to look over his shoulder in case they did.

The folding doors were violently pushed open, and Brian made his way downstairs in such a speed that he was positive he was attracting the attention of practically everyone around him. He was happy to see that not too many people were out in the hallways, but still, he could feel the looks of judgement from the few who were present. He ignored them as much as he could, pushed them away with the thought that Freddie and Roger  could be following him. He knew that the couple, one of them severely weakened by an eating disorder and the other by substance abuse, would never be able to keep up with him at the speed he was currently going; still, he realised they could find him sooner or later if he ran into one of the public rooms of Queen Mary’s. He would not be safe in the gym, the library, the laundry room, or even in the bathrooms; he had to leave the building.

John’s spot. That was where he had to go; he had to get past security, rush outside, and open up the wall that led to John’s secret cave. John would not be in at the moment anyway, as he was off to see his psychiatrist; and as Freddie and Roger did not know he was aware of John’s place of retreat, they would not search for him at that place either.

With renewed vigour, Brian rushed through the hallways past the canteen, the gym, the living room and game room and God knew what more places the institution had to keep a couple of hundred young men from getting bored out of their mind. He unhooked his patient card from the iron clasp with which it was fastened to his trousers on his way to the exit so he could show it off to the wardens faster. However, when he approached the place, he saw that there was no use for it. There were no guards to be seen in a mile radius.

Brian cursed under his breath, fearing that the doors would be locked now that there were no wardens to regulate it. If Freddie and Roger  would be coming after him now, they would be able to catch him in no time. The only way out would be to rush into the bathroom on the left side; this room, however, he had decided not to ever enter again if he could help it. It had been this particular room in which Jimmy had hanged himself.

Brian was still frantically searching for a possible escape when he suddenly noticed that one of the glass doors was open; and not only that, when he jogged towards the space where the guardians would usually sit and felt at the door, it turned out to be completely unlocked. Brian looked around; it all seemed a bit too easy and suspicious, and he felt as if it was a test to see if people would leave the building without checking out. However, when he walked to the other side of the area and could see no one through the glass doors there either, he decided he was just going to have to take the risk, and he leapt through the outside doors.

It was not particularly warm outside, and Brian could swear he could feel a hint of slight drizzle falling down on him, but he had never been so happy to have been free from the confinements of the building. There was nobody to be seen in the garden from his point of view, so he knew he could safely reach the cave without anybody seeing him slipping through some suspicious looking brick wall and possibly betraying John’s highly esteemed place of privacy. He stayed close to the outer wall of the building and continued vigilantly looking around to spot bystanders on his way to the sheds. No one seemed to be around, however; and after having checked twice, he halted at the place he knew he had to be. Turning around, he smoothed his hand along the rough lines of bricks, until he eventually felt the small inlet behind which he had seen John slip his fingers. He followed the example his friend had set previously, and, after a bit of feeling around, the secret door gave in.

Brian felt relief washing over him when he pulled the heavy door open, and, with one more glance to the outer world, he disappeared into the area that was laid bare to him. The improvised door he closed behind him again; and the moment he had withdrawn himself from the visible space of the gardens, Brian felt like he was free.

‘Thank _God_ ,’ he whispered into the emptiness of the cave, resting his back between the side wall and looking up into the sky above him. His heart was still drumming in his chest and he was close to gasping for breath. The silence around the secret escape confirmed that his roommates had not followed him - or, if they had, that they hadn’t caught up with him yet - and he had never been more grateful for being on his own.

Or well… _almost_ on his own.

‘Hi, Brian,’ a voice suddenly called out to him, and despite himself, Brian could not help emitting a more than a little embarrassing cry of shock at the sound of it. Listening to the closeness of it, the sound could impossibly come from anyone outside the space, and when he frantically looked around, he saw, at the other end of the half-dark corridor-like area, a person crouching down on the ground and looking up at him without any of the shock Brian had encountered when he had found out he was not alone. Brian felt both relief and anxiety washing over him; relief because it was not some serial killer who found his way into this hiding place to kill him slowly and painfully, and anxiety because he had no idea how to look at John now that he had just cried out at him so embarrassingly.

‘God, John, you frightened me!’ Brian squeaked, putting his hand on his chest to feel if his heart rate was already going down again a bit now that the unknown entity speaking to him turned out to ‘just’ be his crush. Unfortunately, he had a feeling that if any changes were possible to monitor, it would have been his heart pounding out of control even more than it had done before.

Now smiling, John said in that soothing voice of his which Brian liked so much: ‘It’s only me. I can’t be that scary.’

‘Of course you’re not. I just didn’t expect to find you here,’ Brian said, but soon afterwards realised this was a stupid answer; after all, this was John’s cave, and it was silly to say one would not expect the owner of a place to be present at said space. As if he would have expected to find other people in John’s cave; patients, roommates, staff, anyone apart from John himself. ‘I meant, not right now. I thought you had a meeting with your psychiatrist?’ Brian half-said, half-asked.

‘I did,’ John said, tapping on the muddy ground next to the spot he was sitting on. The last time Brian had been here, when John had introduced him to his cave while fleeing for random drug searches, he had been wary of sitting down on the dirty surface. This time, however, he did not need to be told twice when John invited him, and was quick to walk over and join him on the ground.

‘But?’ Brian asked as soon as he had flopped down and scooted next to John as close as he could without making it too awkward or obvious.

‘I didn’t feel like going,’ John shrugged. ‘Don’t want anyone to interfere with me at the moment.’

‘I see,’ Brian said, before it struck him that this might be a poorly hidden hint from John’s side that he did not appreciate him dropping by unexpectedly. ‘If you want me to go…’

‘Of course not,’ John said as if it was overly obvious. ‘You know I could never mind having you around,’ he said, which Brian had grown to understand was John’s way of telling him he enjoyed his presence regardless of the situation.

Brian blushed a little, and affirmed once more: ‘But if you don’t want me here, you should tell me.’

‘Won’t happen, I’m afraid. You’re stuck with me here now,’ John grinned. ‘Either way, what brings you here? I thought you were helping Jeff in the laundry room.’

‘I was, but only for two hours. I just left to go back to our room,’ Brian told him.

‘This is not our room, in case you didn’t notice,’ John remarked after a few seconds of silence.

‘I know. It’s just… when I got there I realised I needed a moment on my own,’ Brian said. ‘Or on my own with you, that is,’ he said to return the compliment John had just paid his presence.

‘Did anything happen?’ John asked him.

‘Not really,’ Brian mumbled, but it sounded bleak and untrue to his own ears. He had a feeling that when John opened his mouth again to talk it would be to ask if he was sure about nothing having happened, but he would never get to know this for sure - for just when John was about to produce the first syllable, a cry of his name cut him off and sent the both of them into silence to listen to whoever it was outside their safe haven and what they wanted.

‘Brian! Brian, where are you?’ the voice was shrill and high-pitched, and when John and he faced each other, Brian was positive they both knew it could be no one else than Roger.

‘Come on, dear, we told you we were sorry!’ a voice accompanied the first one, and though it sounded a bit off and choked-up, the use of ‘dear’ told the both of them that it was without a doubt Freddie. Brian felt his heart - which by now had adopted a more regular pace again - skip a beat at the sound of the voices of their roommates. It seemed that they had not felt like listening when he had told them to leave him alone, and seeing that they had run outside the building, they also did not seem to be planning on giving up on searching him anywhere soon. Brian tried to tell himself to stay calm, but this was harder than expected; especially when footsteps neared and the volume of the voices increased.

‘Brian, are you somewhere here?’ Roger asked again. ‘Please, we didn’t mean it like that!’

John turned to Brian with one eyebrow raised in inquisitiveness, but all Brian could do in response was put his finger to his lips to wordlessly tell him to stay silent.

‘Brian, come on! We won’t do it again!’ Freddie backed up. Brian could feel John’s glance burning right through him in a silent attempt to catch his attention and have the situation be explained to him, but he could not bring himself to look at him. All he could do was face down and hope that neither John nor he himself would make any noise that would betray his position.

‘Care to explain-’ John started in another attempt to find out what on earth had gone down between the remainder of his roommates, but he did not get very far.

‘Shhh,’ Brian responded quickly, covering John’s mouth with the palm of his hand. This seemed to work; John gave in to silence, and they looked at each other as if they had agreed that it was their shared aim to remain unnoticed to the people looking for Brian. About a minute or so passed during which Freddie and Roger’s voices were audible in the yard, until eventually they could hear words of resignation.

‘I don’t think we’re gonna find him here,’ Roger called out to Freddie. They could not make out the exact words of the reply Freddie gave his partner, but they caught something along the lines of ‘laundry room’ and ‘shower cabins,’ after which voices faded away. They unanimously decided to keep quiet for another minute or so, until it was Brian himself who eventually broke the silence.

‘I think the coast is clear,’ he whispered while peering over his shoulder as if that would help him view the outside world. His friend responded with something of a wordless, muffled sound, and it was only then that Brian realised he still had John’s hand covered with his mouth. He was swift to release it and awkwardly mumble: ‘sorry for that.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ John told him, after which he soon got back to business. ‘Well, I don’t want to be _that_ person, but it no longer convinces me that ‘‘nothing happened’’ now that roommates just stood outside here screaming your name at the top of their lungs and begging for forgiveness.’

Brian sighed - there was indeed no way John would now believe him if he said nothing had gone down that had made him want to flee their room now that Freddie and Roger had appeared to look for him with all of their might. He wanted to tell John what had gone down; he did not want to keep things from the only person he truly felt he could trust at this place. He told himself that it might even make him feel better if he would get the matter off his chest, and that there was no one else but John that he would even consider opening up to. But one major problem remained - if he was to tell John the reason why he had run out of their dormitory and hide in here, he would have to tell him about the notebook Freddie and Roger had found, and why it was so bad that his friends had read what had started off as a homework assignment given to him by Sarah but which had ended in an actual love letter. And this, of course, would inevitably lead to John finding out how Brian felt about him, how he felt his knees grow weak and his stomach churn whenever John did as much as smile at him. How could he ever face his friend slash crush again if this news were to come out? How could he ever hold out life at this Godforsaken place if it was not for John being at his side and guiding him through every hardship and every lonely moment? How could he even think of ruining the bond he had with John for a feeling he was certain of was not reciprocated by his crush?

‘You know you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ John said when Brian remained silent, and even though Brian knew he was just imagining it, he could not shake off the fear of hurting, upsetting, or worrying John if he would not at least let him in on the situation. More than this, if he did not tell John the whereabouts, he ran the risk of John reaching out to Freddie and Roger to hear what it was that had upset him, and that could possibly end up in an even bigger catastrophe than if he was to now choose his own words to describe what had happened without embarrassing himself all too much.

‘Of course I don’t mind telling you,’ Brian shrugged and tried to keep up the air of being way more composed than how he currently felt inside. ‘I returned from the laundry room where I helped Jeff out and such this morning, and when I got back to our room Freddie and Roger were sitting on my bed acting all suspiciously. So I asked them what they were doing, and they didn’t want to tell me, and then…’ Brian paused a second to choose his words wisely, knowing he should not say either too little or too much. ‘It turned out they had gone through all my personal stuff. You know, my clothes, my suitcase, drawer…’ Brian said to make things appear a bit more serious than they might be, not wanting to come across like a total loser if he would come across to John saying their roommates had read his notebook. Truth was, he did not know how much of this they had actually done; but given that he usually hid his notebook far away under a pile of clothes in the suitcase under his bed, he knew he could hardly be wrong about them having rummaged his belongings like vultures seeking scraps of rotten meat.

His words - whether exaggerated or the truth - seemed to have the desired effect, though. Turning to look at him with what seemed like a look of both shock and anger, John asked: ‘Seriously?’

‘Yes, it appeared so. I always hide my notebook all the way to the back of my drawer or suitcase, so to have got to it they must have done some digging, as it is,’ Brian mumbled.

‘God, that’s _sick_. What were they doing that for?’ John pondered out loud. ‘Did they steal anything from you?’

‘I don’t know, but I don’t think they did,’ Brian said. ‘I don’t really have anything worth stealing with me in this place.’ He realised it sounded kind of pathetic to put it like this, but it was the truth - his passport he had needed to hand in at the front door of Queen Mary’s, and since money could not get one anywhere here (or, that was, nothing _he_ was interested in), he had left his purse at home. ‘I think if they would have wanted to steal something, they would not have been sitting there on my bed reading my notebook as comfortably as they did,’ Brian grumbled.

‘You’re probably right about that, but still…’ There was silence between the pair of them for a moment, but Brian could tell that John was seriously displeased with the news of their roommates having been incapable of keeping their hands to their own possessions. ‘What kind of notebook was it, by the way?’

 _Ouch_ … That was one question Brian had so far been happy to have been able to avoid, and he closed his eyes in an attempt to focus on whatever it was that he was going to say. ‘Its… Well, it started off as just some kind of sketchbook when I was still in school. But when I took it here I used it to write letters to my parents, so it has some unfinished letters in it still. And… Well, Sarah - you know Sarah, my psychiatrist, right?’ he asked; not because it really mattered, but to win some more time to come up with an answer that would not sound all too silly, as he was fearing he was starting to come across like by the way he was talking right now. When John nodded, Brian continued: ‘So Sarah told me to write down how I felt, keep track of my emotions and thoughts and such. As part of the therapy.’

‘A sort of diary you’re keeping?’ John asked.

‘Some kind of, I suppose,’ Brian said. He knew that the word diary was exactly the concept he was currently describing, but he preferred not to use the term. His thirteen year old cousins kept diaries - he, as a twenty-four year old man, would like to distance himself as far from that word as possible. Or, at least, that was, as long as he was in the presence of other people - and especially in the presence of John, on whom he was perpetually trying not to come across as either a total loser or a nervous wreck. Feeling that the phrase ‘diary keeping’ would not exactly help him keep his reputation, or whatever was left of it, to John, Brian felt the irrepressible need to make it all out as if it did not matter all too much to him that Freddie and Roger had read his attempts at confessions of love to John; he was about to do anything to make sure John would not find why exactly he was so sensitive to people having read the figments of his brains.

‘Look, I’m probably overreacting, but it’s just…’ Brian started, but he was given no chance to finish.

‘It doesn’t matter whether it has math equations or your deepest thoughts written down in it, they have no business going through your personal belongings,’ John said, sounding more fed up with Freddie and Roger’s actions than Brian could an ‘outsider’ who was not affected by their nosiness could expect to feel - even more fed up than he was himself, it seemed. ‘When we get back inside I’ll tell them to lay off-’

‘No, please don’t do that,’ Brian was quick to respond, understanding all too well that the more John got involved into the matter, the bigger chances of him finding out what Freddie and Roger had read would be. ‘I mean, it’s kind of you to offer, but I’ll settle it with them myself,’ he said as firmly as he could. That he was in doubt about this statement himself seemed to show, because the first thing John did was question it.

‘You sure? I mean, of course you can do that, but I think it’s fair to say I might hold some more power over them than you do. I’ve known them for longer and put them in their place after many a wrong heroin injection and throw-up session somewhere behind a planter in the garden, you see.’ John shrugged as if it was nothing, but Brian felt himself shivering at just the thought of having to drag his roommates, sick or unconscious or both of those, back into their room after one of their self-inflicted torture. During his stay at Queen Mary’s, he by now must have witnessed at least three or four moments of Roger somehow having gotten by drugs of some sort, and everything having to do with eating remained a total disaster with Freddie, but he was glad that John was always with him. John knew what to do if he found a needle lodged in the brushed skin of Roger’s armpit, or when he found Freddie trying to push his fingers down his throat; he stayed calm, he talked and acted according to the needs their roommates had at that given moment, he knew what to do while all Brian could do was stand in the corner and pray nobody would get hurt. But this was an entirely different matter - all Brian knew he had to focus on right now was making sure John would not scold Freddie and Roger for having looked through his possessions.

‘I’ll manage, thanks,’ Brian said, feeling like he still did not sound too convincing, but apparently it was enough for John to leave it at that.

‘Can I do something else for you, then? Go back inside and see if they’ve cleaned up your things decently in the meantime?’

‘I’d rather stay here for a bit. I don’t feel like facing them yet,’ Brian admitted, which was partly the truth - he really did not want to face them yet, and needed to come up with a way to convince Freddie and Roger not to let John know what they had seen in his notebook. At this specific moment, though, he did not want to trade his current position, sitting so close to John that their upper arms were touching, for a situation in which he would have to share John’s attention with either the rest of the group or with the ceiling.

‘That’s okay,’ John consented. ‘Just make sure you do discuss it with them. I know this must sound stupid coming from me, but you need to let them know it’s not okay to rummage through your things when you’re out of sight for a moment.’

‘I will. I just… don’t really want to think of it all right now,’ Brian said, a bit absent-mindedly as he rested the back of his head against the brick wall behind him and looked up at the thin strip of fair sky above him.

‘That’s fair. I’ll shut up,’ John said. Brian knew that John understood that this was not what he intended with his words, but he still could not help trying to put things right again.

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said softly.

‘I know. I just had a feeling you didn’t really want to talk about it all too much anymore,’ John said, which Brian inwardly had to admit was the case. He did not want to talk too much about the topic, feeling ashamed of how sensitively he had reacted to Roger and Freddie’s discovery of the notebook, and afraid John would find out what it was he had written in his notebook. He was afraid, however, that not talking meant they would have to head back inside again, which was the last thing he wanted at the moment. Sure, it was unpleasantly cold sitting on the muddy ground of the cave, and Brian was sure he would have to change his clothes once he would get inside, but still he would not give up sitting here with John for the world.

‘Maybe not. But I… I want you to just… you know…’ Brian podded one finger into the dirt next to his shoe while figuring out how to tell John that he wanted him to sit here with him for the rest of the afternoon, sitting close to each other and finding comfort in each other’s company. 

‘Yes…?’ John said, but not impatiently - encouragingly, if anything, inviting Brian to speak his mind.

‘Just stay here and sit next to me,’ Brian blurted out eventually. ‘I just want to sit here, with you next to me, and just… stay here together.’ He held in his breath while he waited for John’s reaction, but there turned out to be no need; John was all in favour.

‘Of course. Everything you wish,’ John said, after which he pulled his left arm away from its position on the floor, where his fingers had been almost close enough to touch Brian’s. For a moment Brian was going to be disappointed, but there soon turned out to be no need; all John did was unzip the overly big coat he had put on before he had come outside. In all his hurry, Brian had not thought of grabbing a jacket from the wardrobe before he had stormed outside. For a second, he wondered if he should maybe get out of the cave and run the risk of being seen by Freddie and Roger to get himself one - it was not particularly warm for an early April afternoon - but it seemed that John had him covered. Once he had dragged down the zipper and taken his left arm out of the sleeve, he scooped even closer to Brian than he had already been before, and manoeuvred the part he had just given up on around Brian’s back.

‘Here, have a bit of this coat to keep you warm. It’s too warm for me, and it’s ridiculously large on me anyway,’ John gave as a reason, but for some reason, Brian sensed that it was little more than just an excuse. He kept telling himself not to get himself excited by little hints he sometimes found in John’s behaviour that made him think John might feel a sort of affection for him that could hint to more than ordinary friendship, but the blush on John’s face and the way he averted his eyes when he secured the coat around his shoulders, was something Brian simply could not convince himself meant nothing at all. He was not entirely sure how to interpret it, especially not in the heat of the moment, with John nestling himself close against his side, but he could not shake off the feeling that they were on the brink of passing the border of friendly affection somewhere now - if they had not crossed it already.

‘Won’t you get cold yourself now?’ Brian asked when he had no idea how else to react to John positioning himself against his side.

‘I won’t. Don’t worry about me,’ John said with a bit of a smile. He looked a bit hesitant, as if there was something he wanted to say or do but was not sure if Brian would be comfortable with it.

‘Is there something wrong?’ Brian asked, and John, though a bit taken aback, seemed glad he asked.

‘Just tired,’ he shrugged, and Brian could feel the movement of his shoulder against his own. Soon it moved away, however; and before he could even pity the loss of John’s arm against his, he felt how John carefully rested his head on his shoulder, and he felt a feeling of warmth spreading through his entire body.

‘Is this okay?’ John whispered, and Brian smiled at the idea that John thought of the possibility of it being not okay for him to rest his cheek on Brian’s shoulder. It was not just okay - it was fine. It was great. It was perfect. It was all Brian could possibly wish for.

‘Of course it is,’ Brian assured him. Feeling exceptionally brave at that given moment now that he knew John felt comfortable enough around him to scoop close to him and lie against him as intimately as he was doing right now, Brian carefully freed his arm from underneath John’s body, reached it around, and put his shaking fingers on the curve of John’s hip.

‘And is it okay on my side if I…’

‘Couldn’t be better,’ John answered, and Brian had to bite down his bottom lip to prevent himself from smiling like a love-drunk idiot. The second he heard John sighing softly and cuddling up to him just a little closer, he forgot all that had been worrying him for the past month. He forgot the notebook, Freddie and Roger, the overstressed laundry team, his psychiatrist, his parents, violence and weapons and drugs and mental illnesses and all more he witnessed on a daily basis at this place - everything seemed to have faded away the moment John had rested his warm cheek against the bony structure of his shoulder- and collarbone. All that mattered was the present, this exact moment, and this exact moment was more than Brian ever could have asked for to happen when the gates of Queen Mary’s had first closed in on him.  

 


	11. Part Eleven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey my dearest readers! It's been a bit longer than I would have hoped for but we are back with a new chapter of the Clinic! Thank you all so much for your comments - I haven't gotten through answering all of them, but I'm hoping to find some time this week to do so! At any rate they're much appreciated, so if you've got anything to say/comment/ask/whatever, don't hesitate to do so - it might take a little while but I eventually answer everything that comes into my inbox! Thank you in advance and have fun reading!

The week that followed passed swiftly, but not without its usual incidents and obstacles. Though Brian did not mingle all too much with the community of Queen Mary’s, Freddie and Roger would always make sure he stayed on top of all that happened or might have happened at the place. It was said that while he had been helping out in the kitchen for the much desired privilege points for the bass guitar he desired to collect for John, a fight had broken out between the apothecarists and two drug users who had newly been admitted into the place, and it had taken police forces to calm them down and put them in isolation when Queen Mary’s staff hadn’t managed on their own. Word also went around that Will, one of the boys who lived next door, had not walked into a door, but that one of his roommates had given him a black eye when he had threatened to tell their mentor he had smuggled a screwdriver into the place.

Other things Brian witnessed directly; such as being woken up in the middle of the night for a room search. He himself had nothing to hide of course, but Roger was busted when they found a syringe hidden inside the seam of his pillow. Since it was empty and staff did not have the proper tools to check what substance had been in it, he was let go of with a warning, and did not have to go back into isolation like the previous time they had caught him red-handed negotiating the price of an LSD pill. Brian had also been present when staff had needed to cut someone out of the barbed wire he had gotten stuck in in an attempt to jump over the fences surrounding the garden. Closing the door of their dormitory behind him to find that someone had scratched the word ‘fag’ into it - presumably aimed at either Freddie, or Roger, or the both of them - had not been a pretty moment either.

This time, however, Brian was able to quickly shrug off all of these matters and continue to go about his day as he had gotten used to do after five weeks of living at Queen Mary’s. He briefly wondered if life at the clinic had toughened him, hardened him to a degree where people pulling knives out on each other and having their room raided in search of drugs, weapons, or other illegal possessions no longer bothered him. He soon found out this was not the cause, though - it was just that now he realised he had the support he needed to pull him through. It was as if with every passing day, he discovered again how much he could rely on John. Whether it was to cheer him up or to have a shoulder to cry on - because surely, that continued to be something John reassured him happened to the best of them during their stay at place like that - John was the one he could go to. And even though right from the start John had established himself as the kind of person who did not require too much support from the people around him, Brian noticed how every day his crush seemed to open up to him a bit more than the previous day.

Slowly but surely, John traded silence for words, staring at the ceiling for looking at Brian whenever he talked with the fondest expression in his eyes. He exchanged endlessly lying in bed for strolling around the garden with Brian whenever the two of them found themselves having time off between meals, therapy sessions, and other obligations. Brian felt how John let down his walls to him concerning his emotions, his opinions, and his genuine personality each day, and he felt himself falling more and more for his roommate. Going to group therapy, keeping up with appointments with Sarah, and signing up for voluntary work for privilege points all faded in the distance when Brian noticed that the only real cure he could find at this place was John, and he did all that was in his might to get him alone as often as he could. Sometimes he wondered if he was laying too much of a claim on his crush, that he would bore or annoy him by always trying to be around him; but John’s attitude towards him suggested that he did not mind. On the contrary - it suggested that he wanted nothing more than to be around him whenever he could, too.

It was during a group therapy session on a regular Tuesday morning in April that Brian - who was nearly bored to tears by Jasper going on and on about something about strengths and weaknesses no one cared about - that it was once again established that John really was his priority, and that he was John’s, for that matter.

‘So then at the end the strength-weakness chart should look something like this,’ Jasper said with a strong emphasis on the last word while he pointed at the blackboard he had just been scribbling down words and arrows into several directions. Brian glanced towards the creations of their therapist from the corner of his eyes, but when he noticed that nobody was paying any special attention to it, his focus slipped back to John again. John was looking at him, and from the intensity of his eyes, it seemed like he had never even looked up at the board.

‘Has everybody seen it?’ Jasper asked, and the group unanimously mumbled something that should probably be interpreted in the affirmative. Jasper looked doubtful; but instead of calling someone out and telling them to repeat what he had just written down, as he did at times, he simply picked up the board wipe and erased all the words, only leaving the lines of the chart in place.

‘Then I would now like to have all of you inventarise your strengths and weaknesses, and see if we can get them to balance each other out. We’ll start with you, Eli,’ Jasper said to the person sitting closest to him. Eli, who was slouching on his chair and only opened his eyes when he heard his name being called out, looked both rather confused and rather irritated upon having been appointed to cut off the assignment.

‘A somewhat more active attitude, please,’ Jasper insisted when Eli slouched down just a little more, if still possible.

‘Sure,’ Eli mumbled, rubbing his face with both hands as he pushed himself into a more straight position on the uncomfortable wooden chair. No one could exactly blaming for finding new ways to sit on the thing, Brian thought dimly.

‘So, what would you say is one of your weaknesses?’ Jasper got right to the point, crayon in hand for when Eli would come up with the first of what Brian assumed was going to be either a very long or very short list. This was the depression therapy group, after all, but on the other hand that also meant no one was particularly enthusiastic to speak up, especially with eleven people around you being able to overhear all you said.

Brian felt how John was approaching him from his right side, how his friend’s long hair tickled his neck as he whispered in his ear: ‘My weakness is having to endure this trash for forty-five minutes on end without rolling my eyes every two seconds.’ Brian chuckled involuntarily; he knew they were supposed to be silent while someone else was talking, and that Jasper would call them out on breaching this rule right away, but God, who could sit through an hour of this nonsense without having to complain about it once or twice to their neighbour?

‘Something to add, John?’ their therapist asked as he turned around, the crayon still raised slightly next to his head as if he was going to write something down.

Brian, who had trouble oppressing his smile, hoped that John would say something to save the day - which he was glad to find he did. No matter how silent and reticent John was in public, one could always count on him to speak when necessary. ‘Just that I find it hard to come up with enough strengths to balance out my weaknesses,’ John replied coolly, not at all sounding distraught by having been called out for talking.

Jasper, seeming to be surprised at John’s sudden openness and alertness, lowered the crayon to the height of his waist. ‘What did I tell you about negative thoughts towards yourself?’

‘That we need to let go it and anything that causes it,’ John repeated the words they had heard a trillion times by now, in a leisure voice that made it sound _just_ a bit mocking, causing someone in the group to snort.

‘In that case I’m going, guys. See you all at lunch time,’ said Irvin - a remarkably upbeat adolescent Brian had come to appreciate for his wit the last few weeks - while he stood up from the chair he was sitting on. At this action, the group unanimously seemed to decide to all let go their quiet indifference towards their surroundings, and a contagious, loud laughter erupted from the group - loud enough to distract several people from adjoining groups housing at other places in the canteen. Brian and John took the opportunity to flash each other a smile, and John bent towards Brian again to whisper something in his ear again.

‘Wanna go outside and play some guitar after this?’

Brian felt his heart skip a beat at this proposal, even though he knew it should hardly come as a surprise anymore; they would agree to spending time between the two of them after group therapy practically each day. Still, every time John asked him felt like winning the lottery all over again.

‘Of course. If this ever comes to an end,’ Brian whispered back at John, even though he realised there was no need to whisper anymore. The group had emerged from total silence to complete chaos; everyone was laughing, chatting, and copying Irvin’s motions of leaving the chair behind to exchange the boring therapy lesson for a self-chosen activity. It was eventually the way Jasper loudly clapped his hands that caught the attention of everybody, and which slowly calmed everyone down again to the level where he could speak again and be sure everyone would hear him.

‘Alright, that was it, people. Irvin, sit down again. This is breaking the spirit of the group,’ John said sternly, which he probably soon wished he hadn’t.

‘Can’t break what’s already broken!’ Bill piped up in a successful attempt to add fuel to the fire that Jasper has just tried so hard to extinguish. Sebastian clapped in his hands and shouted that he was just about to say the exact same thing, and soon after everybody was talking of all that was broken about or within them; their spirit, their mental health, their enthusiasm, their lust for life.

‘Guys…’ Jasper sighed, probably wondering what he had done to deserve such treatment all of a sudden. ‘Lighten up a little, okay? The more actively you participate, the more fun it will become.’ This proposition was met with resistance in the form of frowning faces and many ‘well…’-s and ‘actually…’-s, and Brian was just starting to feel bad for Jasper when their therapist corrected his previous statement by saying: ‘The sooner it will be over.’

This instantly turned out to be a whole lot more effective when it came to motivating a group of depressed adolescents to actively participate in a seemingly useless practical assignment. ‘ _There_ you got us,’ said Irvin, who now moved his chair back into the circle, folded his arms over each other, and looked up at the still largely empty board with renewed interest. His attitude seemed to be contagious for the rest of the group, who now also understood that the only way to be let go of was through honest participation.

They shared some comments between the two of them, and were largely left alone; it was only when first Brian and then John listed ‘talking to people’ as one of their weaknesses that they got this flung back at their heads.

‘You seem very good at talking to each other, nevertheless,’ Jasper remarked before he turned around to copy the words onto the blackboard. Some people chuckled, others just stared at them; Brian’s first instinct was to blush and hide his face, but John seemed unperturbed as he leant in to whisper into Brian’s ear as if they had never been called out on this activity.

‘Nevermind them. We’re the ones to whisper, not the ones to make all the noise in this group,’ John told him, to which Brian nodded shily. They made sure not to whisper during their own turns, but as soon as the focus shifted away from them again, they could not help themselves. Comments like ‘if that ain’t me’ and ‘where did we hear that before?’ whenever somebody said something relatable had to be spoken out loud to each other - and surely they were not the only ones giving each other a grimace every now and then. In fact, they found themselves rather decent in terms of facial expressions. While they would slow blink at each other, Paul and Eli, among others, would simply roll their eyes when Jasper attempted to dig beneath the surface of somebody’s strengths and weaknesses.

At last the session ran to an end; Sebastian, who was the last of the group to share his strengths and weaknesses, was sure to have them all lined up and not to waste too many words on explaining them to make sure they wouldn’t have to spend more time than absolutely necessary. Upon glancing around the canteen, the group had already established that they were the last ones to leave the place, so they were more than happy when Jasper pulled everyone together at last for some inspirational closing words and an admonition for the lack of focus and interest the group had shown that day.

‘I’m hoping for some more effort next time. Tomorrow somebody will join me, and I would be very embarrassed to have her instruct a group of mutes,’ Jasper said, but the admonitory effect of it was immediately lost when curiosity took over.

‘Who’s gonna be here then, tomorrow?’ Eli asked.

‘A girl called Amy. She’s a third year psychology student who will have her internship at Queen Mary’s. She will join me and two other psychologists during our daily activities,’ Jasper said.

‘Is she attractive?’ Sebastian asked, wiggling suggestively with his eyebrows, which earned him an indignant yet amused poke against the ribs from his neighbour.

Jasper, probably knowing better than to tell Sebastian off for his superficial remark, told him: ‘Show up tomorrow and judge for yourself.’ This resulted in the necessary wooing from about half of the group, and eyerolls were exchanged between John and Brian for this pubertal behaviour.

‘But what about Ariel, then?’ Andrew suddenly asked amidst the saucy comments concerning the new intern, looking a bit uncomfortable as he asked the question. At the mentioning of the name of their other group therapist, almost all noise instantly dropped - Andrew had asked a question that had been on everybody’s minds, but which no one had dared to ask so far. All that had been released upon her sudden disappearance was that there had been an ‘incident with a patient’, but no one knew exactly what that meant. Of course, the wildest stories were going around, ranging from physical violence to sexual assault, and from death threats to rape - but who could know for sure when none of the staff was willing to release a statement on the matter? Brian just hoped that whatever it was that had happened to Ariel was not all too bad, but he feared for the worst; this was Queen Mary’s after all, a psychiatric hospital where drugs, weapons, and violence sometimes appeared to be part of daily life. When one got straight down to the facts, no one was completely safe here, especially not a petite young woman amidst two hundred men who had been cut off from the outer world for only God knew how long.

‘Ariel won’t be coming back,’ Jasper said, ‘Or at least not within a reasonable time span.’

The silence seemed to deepen when the group was told that their therapist was not coming back. They had all known something serious must have gone down; Ariel was a sweet but tough person, not at all the one to let anyone walk over her. That she had been absent for weeks and was not expected to be back again soon, did not say anything about her, but everything about the seriousness of whatever it was she had been pulled through.

‘Does she even want to come back here?’ Irvin asked eventually when the entire group seemed to be looking at each other to say something to get the conversation going again.

‘She wants to, yes, but not without more security and supervision around the place,’ Jasper said.

‘And will that be arranged?’ Brian found himself joining in. He was not usually the one to talk in public when not spoken to, but he could not help himself this time.

‘Management is looking into it,’ John said. ‘The thing is that we have been saying for _ages_ that we need more people on the work floor to prevent such incidents, but there are always excuses - not enough trained staff to find, no money, no priority, no use. Something terrible always has to happen first before anybody is willing to do anything, that’s the issue with this Goddamn place-’

At the realisation of the language he had just used, Jasper cut himself off, and he cleared his throat and fiddled a bit awkwardly with the crayon he was still holding in his left hand. ‘I’m sorry - I should not have said that. I let myself go,’ he apologised, although Brian was sure no one of the group could possibly hold it against their therapist.

‘It’s not as if someone can blame you for it,’ Irvin said, and multiple people nodded in agreement.

‘I know I’m not supposed to say anything negative about this place and it’s procedures as part of my job, but it’s just that… When things like this happen, when we cannot guarantee safety for everyone, it’s just that it’s not fair. Not towards staff or patients or anybody in between,’ he said a bit vaguely, but everyone knew exactly what he was talking about. They had all, sooner or later, found out that Queen Mary’s could be a dangerous place; the fights, the drugs, the weapons people somehow managed to smuggle in. The flashback to him having stopped Drew from physically assaulting Jimmy while a whole group of people was just standing around watching it, was all Brian needed to know exactly what Jasper was talking about.

‘But let’s just hope they’ll finally do something now. And in the meantime, the only thing we can do is carry on as civil as we can,’ Jasper said as a concluding sentence, which everyone quietly agreed to. ‘Well, thank you, guys. I’ll see you tomorrow,’ their therapist said after that, probably feeling that this was a good note to end today’s session on. He released the group with a polite nod into their general direction, after which he turned around to the board to wipe out the chart of strength and weaknesses as he had recorded of the last person in the group. People around them stood up and started dragging the chairs back to their original places, but today, no loud noise or laughter erupted; everyone seemed a bit more quiet after having heard the news of Ariel not returning and Jasper clearly having been fed up with the protocol at Queen Mary’s. The face that he had said his words of goodbye and had swiftly turn around so that the group could not see his facial expression, was all they needed to see to understand that he was upset.

‘Should we… Do you think Jasper’s okay?’ Brian whispered to John whilst they dragged their seats back to a chairless table. John turned around as discreetly as possible. Upon seeing how their therapist was briskly wiping out all evidence on the board without turning around once to try and see if there was anyone he could start some kind of conversation with, as he would usually do, they seemed to wordlessly agree that he was not okay.

‘Doesn’t seem like it… Do you want to go to him?’ John asked feebly. Brian could hear the doubtfulness in his voice, and he knew it was a mixture of his friend’s usual reticence and a shyness that seemed to overcome practically anybody when wondering whether to approach someone or not. Brian currently dealt with the same dilemma; he did not like mingling with people, did not like being mingled with by random people when he found himself in an emotional situation, and had no idea what to even say to Jasper. How on earth should one comfort a therapist when it was usually the therapist’s job to comfort you?

Still…

‘I don’t know. It feels wrong to just leave him here like this,’ Brian said, to which John nodded.

‘So should we just… go there?’ John asked hesitantly whilst stepping into the direction where they came from, when they saw two people walking up to their therapist. They watched on as one of them put their hand on his shoulder, while the other asked if everything was going alright.

‘Looks like Andrew and Irvin already solved that problem for us,’ John remarked, and Brian could hear the relief in his voice. Certainly, they would have gone over and talk to Jasper like they had just decided, but it seemed to the both of them that Andrew and Irvin could probably handle the situation a lot better than them and their social awkwardness. Moreover, it seemed pointless to gather around Jasper as some sort of mob to hear him out about Ariel and failing management. With one more glance into the direction of their therapist, they made their way into the direction of the door that led to the hallway to carry out the plan they had decided on earlier that morning.

‘Come on, let’s grab your guitar and go outside,’ John repeated their plan, placing his hand lightly on Brian’s upper arm as he quickened his pace to skip past a couple of slow-walking men in front of them. Today John did not just seem impatient to get away from the pressing atmosphere that somehow always seemed to cling to every single room of Queen Mary’s; he seemed genuinely excited to go outside and spend time with Brian alone. This, although it put all the more pressure on Brian to live up to what he thought John expected of him while playing music, at the same time heightened his own excitement. John’s state of being seemed to have a contagious effect on him; when John was in a withdrawn, reserved, or quiet mood, then so was he. Similarly, when John was feeling witty and outgoing (for his standard, that was), Brian was quick to join him - and when John was enthusiastic about something, Brian could not help but follow his example. After all, how could one be happy when the person they cared most about was not, and how could one not share their joy when they clearly felt it?

Practically skipping upstairs and avoiding running into anyone as much as possible, Brian listened with a smile to John’s story about how the first time their therapist had brought out the strength-weakness chart, people had been so uninspired that the only good things they could remember about themselves were things like ‘sometimes I water the plants in my living room’ or ‘at least my cat is willing to sit with me when no one else does’. They were still coming up with similar examples they could bring up during the next therapy session when they reached their floor. They opened the door and practically burst into the room to grab Brian’s guitar and make their way out again, but were halted in their plans halfway through when they heard Freddie’s voice behind them.

‘Oh, are we gonna jam again?’ he asked excitedly, and Brian found his smile drop as he looked at John for a solution to this ‘problem’. It was not that he minded playing with Freddie and Roger, but now that they had just established to go out together, he’d rather not have anyone else breathing in their neck, for that matter. On top of that, the incident with Freddie and Roger having snooped around and read the confessions in his diary was still fresh in Brian’s mind. He was not as angry as he had been in the beginning, when he’d caught them red-handed in the act of breaching his privacy, but Brian still preferred to keep a bit of distance between the couple and himself. He was sure he’d get over it in time, but for now he would rather surround himself a little less with them and more with just John alone.

‘Eh…’ he said, and hardly dared looking back at Freddie. Their roommate had already put aside the sketch book he had been working in, and was making an attempt at scrambling off the bed. In doing so, he also woke up Roger, who was sprawled half over him and seemed to have fallen asleep in the middle of the day. Luckily, Brian could count on John to come up with an excuse to shake them off.

‘Actually we were planning on practicing between the two of us. Brian was going to teach me some tunes,’ John added when the word ‘practicing’ made for two confused expressions from their roommates, who probably wondered what he had to practice for, since he did not play guitar.

‘Is he now? I thought you didn’t care for learning music,’ said a weary-sounding Roger as he rubbed the sleep out of the corners of his eyes. He had probably had a rough night after having fixed half a shot of heroine somewhere a few days ago, which his body was now craving for again.

‘Maybe he changed my mind,’ John shrugged.

‘He seems to be the only one around the place who can do so,’ Roger said, but not maliciously - more as if he suddenly understood who to go to if they ever wanted a favour of John. ‘I wonder what it is he does to you.’

‘I think we all know what that must be,’ Freddie said dryly. ‘All those sneak-aways, going to the shower together, hiding in the gardens until dusk…’

‘Oh, you shut up,’ Brian rolled his eyes, and when he looked back at Freddie again, he could see that his roommate was trying to gauge him. He appeared to be finding out how far he could push him in these suggestive comments without making him too uncomfortable - or, worse than that, making it clear to John that Brian had a crush on him. About a week had passed since the incident with the couple flicking through his diary, but the results were still visible. Brian was more reticent around them and had no intentions of letting them in on his crush as he might have considered doing if his roommates hadn’t broken his trust. Still, things had been talked over, and Brian was no longer actively angry with them. Roger and Freddie had apologised profusely for their actions when they had caught Brian on his own the same evening, and had solemnly sworn never to mention any of the contents they had read to anyone, especially not to John himself. Moreover, they were careful not to say anything that might betray that they knew even the slightest detail of Brian’s affinity for John, and made sure that their comments would never exceed a certain boundary that lay between playfulness and actual teasing. Brian could not oppress the idea that this carefulness was at least _something_ positive that the diary situation had spawned - because he had a feeling that Freddie and Roger would have tried their luck at matchmaking through suggestive comments to John on Brian’s behalf if they hadn’t been told off by him so firmly.

‘Come, let’s go,’ John suggested. It was obvious that he was blissfully unaware of the entire situation between the rest of the roommates; he just wanted to have Brian to himself as soon as possible again.

‘You’re not going to play here, then?’ Freddie asked, still seeming to find it a shame that Roger and he were not supposed to join their friends in their session.

‘No, we’re going outside. We won’t have anyone bothering us there,’ John said, which was a thinly veiled attempt to let Freddie know that their presence, though kindly advertised, was not much appreciated today.

‘Of course. You want to pluck at Brian’s strings in silence,’ Freddie said with a wide grin that laid bare his teeth, and which send Roger into a high-pitched fit of laughter.

‘Time to go, Brian,’ John said, placing a hand on his back and softly escorting him towards the door of the room again. They had already spent more time than planned at their dorm room, and John was obviously not planning on wasting any more valuable time. ‘We’ll see you at lunch, guys.’

‘If you don’t disappear into the bushes forever,’ Freddie remarked with an ever-growing smile. As they turned their back on the bedroom and Brian reached for the door, he heard Freddie pipe up: ‘Darlings, if you need anything, it’s in the pencil case in the lower drawer of my nightstand!’

‘Thanks, now I’ll know where to send the staff to confiscate your lifetime supply of lube and condoms next time they come in for a room infiltration!’ John called out just before they closed the door on their roommates, leaving Freddie and Roger to figure out what to do with that comment on their own. Brian would have blushed at Freddie’s comment, but what John had just thrown back at him had evened it out pretty well. On top of that, it had been loud enough for the adjacent rooms to overhear it; and though Freddie attempted to keep up a cool composure, they all knew he was just a shy, perhaps even prude boy on the inside.

‘Perhaps that will teach him,’ John smiled at Brian, who clutched his guitar a bit tighter to his body as they traded the hallway for the stairs. As soon as they had ascended the first set of steps, it immediately became clear to him that there was some kind of happening taking place downstairs. Brian’s first reaction was to halt his movements, be it in the middle of the stairs, and to look on doubtfully to the mass of people standing in the main hallway.

‘They’re not fighting again, are they?’ Brian asked John, who seemed to have picked up that he was no longer walking, and who moved to the left side of the stairs to let some people pass.

‘No, I think they’re collecting their mail. It’s Tuesday, right?’ John asked him.

‘I think it might be?’ Brian said. He had lost track of time by now, and he was positive that if it had not been for the schedule above his bed, he would forget to show up to every single appointment he was supposed to go to. ‘Is there some way to get around all these people?’ Brian pondered out loud, but just as he did, one of the men in the mass of people below pointed into his direction and gestured for him to come over. When Brian - who vaguely recognised the person as someone from Roger’s therapy group - remained frozen to the ground, the man decided to move into his direction.

‘Brian, Nolan is looking for you. He’s got some letters for you,’ he informed him as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. But to Brian, who had not been able to put his hands upon any sort of written text from the outside world since his stay at Queen Mary’s, it was as much of a surprise as if Germany suddenly should have invaded the country from out of nowhere.

‘Letters?’ Brian repeated in a state of bedazzlement. The man did not seem to notice, though; or, if he did, he must have thought it was pleasant surprise, for he was quick to get the letters he was talking of towards their rightful owner.

‘I’ll send him to you. Stay where you are!’ he ordered. Quite unnecessarily, Brian thought to himself - a bomb could explode at that exact moment, and he could not have moved. It was only when Nolan appeared from the multitude that - now that Brian had had the time to study them - seemed to consist of staff members trying to distribute letters into mailboxes and patients trying to all reach their mailbox at the same time - that Brian got back to the present.

‘Oh, there you are! Look, they finally let your letters get through,’ Nolan said as he reached a handful of plain, white envelopes towards Brian. With the help of John, who gave him a soft push in his back, Brian descended a few steps of the stairs to be able to take the letters from Nolan.

‘I thought I wasn’t supposed to… get these…’ Brian said, more to himself than to anyone else as he flipped over the bundle of papers. He saw that the first letter was written in the handwriting of his mother, and he felt his heart skip a beat. Apart from the ten-minute phone call he had been allowed to give his parents twice until this time, he had not heard a single thing from them; and to think that his mother had written this letter, among with probably the majority of the rest of the letters he had been given, made him a bit emotional, although he was unwilling to show this in public.

‘Your former psychiatrist said you should not be in touch with anyone outside Queen Mary’s in the trial period. But it seemed to Sarah, John, and me that the trial period was over, and that it was about time you got these,’ Nolan smiled, and Brian copied him in this. He could seriously hug Nolan, throw his arms around him and thank him a thousand times, but his body seemed frozen to the ground at the mere realisation that he finally was allowed to be in touch with the outside world again. It was not just great to be able to exchange letters with his family, maybe even with friends from university of whom he was pretty sure he held the addresses in his agenda - the best part was that this was another victory over doctor Sumner, of whom he no longer felt like a lab rat now that he had not seen the man in over five weeks.

‘Thank you,’ Brian whispered at Nolan, who remained all smiles as he watched his pupil press the letters closer to his chest.

‘Shall I ask if they can give you a mailbox on your own to pick up your post from?’ Nolan asked, and Brian nodded shyly but firmly. ‘Great. I’ll drop by at the administration this afternoon. Letters usually come in each Tuesday and Friday, and letters you want to send out will be picked up on the same days,’ Nolan said, before he was quite literally dragged aside by someone else who obviously was desperate for attention, leaving Brian standing on the stairs with his hand full of letters.

‘Are you still down to go outside? I can understand if you’d rather read these,’ John suddenly said, bringing Brian back to reality. In the surprise and excitement of the moment, he had almost forgotten the presence of his friend.

‘No, of course we’re still going outside. I can read these any other moment,’ Brian said quickly, folding the letters in half and inserting them in the back pocket of his trousers. ‘Do you want to check your mailbox for letters? I think everything’s been distributed by now,’ he said with a nod towards the mailman who was just leaving the hallway, and the mass of people in front of the mailboxes slowly dissolving into various directions.

‘I don’t usually have anything,’ John shrugged and walked past Brian down the last few remaining steps of the stairs. Brian was quick to clutch onto his guitar again and catch up with his roommate at the bottom of the stairs.

‘You never know, you might-’

‘I _won’t_ ,’ John cut him off rather bitterly. It caught Brian entirely by surprise; sure, he had heard John’s curt replies lots of times, when he had used it towards Freddie, Roger, Jasper, or anyone else he had not deemed worthy of his time or effort - but he had never used it towards Brian, and it left him feeling terribly afraid he had said something damaging, even though he did not know what it was that would make John suddenly cut him off like this.

‘Okay,’ Brian whispered. ‘Okay, then we’ll just go outside.’ He did not know what it was he had said that had upset John, but he was willing to say whatever soothing to calm him down again.

They silently walked through the hallway towards the back entrance of the building, where they patiently let security note down their names and patient numbers. Brian felt the knot in his stomach growing larger with every second they spent in quietness, and was relieved beyond measures when John handed him one of the coats he had just picked up from the clothes rack for him.

‘We should probably put these on. You don’t want to catch a cold,’ he said in his usually calming voice, and Brian nodded as he accepted the coat. John waited on him as he dragged up the zipper, then held the door open for him when Brian picked up his guitar again.

The conversation was slowly being picked up again while they sauntered towards the swings. They looked desolate as ever, the dusty ground below them and the rusty iron cables creaking when the wind set them into the faintest of motion. Nevertheless, this was one of the happiest places of Queen Mary’s Brian could possibly name, because this was where John and he would sit down to talk and play music.

‘Has Roger been here recently?’ John said as they approached their spot.

‘What do you mean?’ Brian asked, but he soon got the clue when John nodded towards the spoon and syringe lying on the ground next to the iron bin. ‘Right. I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad sign that seeing this doesn’t even surprise me anymore.’

‘It probably should surprise us,’ John said as he picked up the remains of a heroin injection and threw it in the bin. ‘Because shit like this shouldn’t be coming in as easily as this.’

‘I wonder how they do it,’ Brian said, sitting down and immediately setting the swing into motion. ‘Does security really not know how to search for drugs?’

‘They do. They just sometimes close their eyes to it,’ John said.

‘But why would they do that? They know that all it ever does is cause troubles for themselves, because they’ll be the ones dealing with aggressive drug users when their shot runs out.’

‘I think the reward for letting it slip through the fingers every now and then is larger than the problems drugs might cause,’ John said, to which Brian frowned.

‘But what could people here possibly give them? It’s not as if we have money or other expensive goods we can trade with security to…’ Brian cut off his own sentence halfway through when both John’s meaningful glance and his own experience at the clinic added one and one together. ‘Right,’ he said softly, already feeling his cheeks heating up for not having thought of that earlier. If the rest of his roommates would have been there, Roger unmistakably would have laughed his lungs out, and Freddie would have pinched his cheek and told him he was too innocent for this world. But John - John sensed that he was feeling uncomfortable enough as it is, and simply moved on to the facts.

‘I think you got here just a bit too early to have been around when Abram, one of the security guards, got fired for having been caught in an ‘indecent context’ with one of the patients in exchange for him letting through the drugs he had gotten by mail,’ John said, and Brian could not help raising an eyebrow in surprise.

‘People are actually willing to… well, prostitute themselves over drugs?’ Brian pondered out loud.

‘Dear boy, they’re addicts. They would probably sell their soul for a shot when they need it.’

‘But Roger always seems so composed, for one,’ Brian remarked. ‘Well, mentally, that is,’ he added when images of Roger lying in bed sick for days after an occasional shot of heroin or cocaine or whatever he could get his hands on.

‘That’s because he knows he has to behave for Freddie’s sake, but he’s been there, trust me,’ John said. Brian was unsure if he wanted to know the details of the story, but was too curious not to ask.

‘Been where?’ Brian asked casually.

‘On his knees in front of Abram in a shower cabin, to put it lightly,’ John said, even though this did not sound like an airy matter at all to Brian.

‘It’s probably a good thing that whoever this Abram was, that he no longer works as a security guard at a mental institution,’ Brian grimaced, to which John smiled.

‘You can say that again. You have no idea how awkward it was living around Freddie and Roger the week after Freddie found out his boyfriend blew some other guy for a shot of heroin,’ John chuckled, and despite not actually wanting to laugh about a serious matter like this, John’s snicker turned out to be contagious. Brian had to avert his face from his friend to prevent laughing too much over the tone of John’s dry voice.

‘God, we’re the worst,’ John said with the remains of a smile on the corner of his lips. ‘Let’s go to work before I won’t be able to get the image of Freddie’s face when Roger made that confession in the height of his cold turkey out of my head.’

‘Let’s,’ Brian said as he picked up his guitar from his lap, afraid he would start imagining what that face must have looked like if he did not distract himself from John’s anecdote right now. He habitually reached out to the back of his guitar to pick up the strap and throw it over his head, but finding it was not there, his arm paused in mid-air.

‘What kind of movement was that?’ John asked, still smiling.

‘I keep forgetting it doesn’t have a guitar strap,’ Brian told him.

‘Oh yeah, sorry for that. We can’t have them for the same reason we can’t have shoe laces,’ John apologised with a nod towards the rubber bands with which several loops of his sneakers had been tied close as some sort of war-time shoelace-substitute. ‘I hope the rest of it is alright, though?’

‘Of course,’ Brian replied. ‘It’s absolutely perfect,’ he said, and he meant it - although no guitar could ever top the feeling of his own Red Special at home, anything that had been given to him by his crush was amazing in his eyes, especially if it was his most beloved instrument which said person had saved up an huge amount of privilege points for in order to be able to get it for him. Brian knew just how expensive it was to order an instrument; his countless hours of volunteering at the laundry room and in the kitchen had just paid off in the form of the bass guitar he had been able to order for John, and knowing that Nolan had already approved of it, all he would have to wait for was for its shipment.

Now having given up on trying to pick up the guitar strap, Brian asked John: ‘What would you like to hear?’

‘Whatever you want to play usually sounds wonderful,’ John said, which made Brian smile softly, and he had to face down and strum the snares of his guitars one by one to make sure John wouldn’t notice the infatuated look in his eyes.

‘Something from the White Album, then?’ Brian proposed, remembering John had told him he appreciated this album of the Beatles particularly much.

‘Can you do While My Guitar Gently Weeps?’ John asked, something close to excitement in his voice at just the idea of Brian playing said song. It had been years since Brian had played it, and although he was not entirely sure of the rhythm any more, there was no way he was going to let John down.

‘It’s been a while, but I’ll try. If you can help with the tune?’ he asked as he placed his fingers a bit firmer on the guitar.

‘Yeah, it went like…’ John frowned and stared in front of him in silence for a few seconds. ‘God, at times like this I wish we would still have a record player instead of just the radio. We used to have the White Album on record, I’m pretty sure of that.’

Brian, who did not recall ever having seen a record player at Queen Mary’s, asked: ‘Why isn’t it around anymore - no, let me guess. Vandalism?’

‘Bingo,’ John said. ‘People used LP’s as frisbees in the canteen, and when someone ripped out the stylus to ram it into the side of someone else’s throat during a fight, they decided to get rid of the entire thing. Either way,’ John continued, unaffected by the whole thing as usual, ‘I think it went a little something like this.’ He started humming a tune that sounded vaguely familiar to Brian, who - in an attempt to try and ignore what he had just heard about using a record player needle to stab someone with - tried to pick it up on his guitar. It didn’t sound entirely natural yet, though, and he halted the movement of his fingers to readjust the way he held the guitar in his hands, and to stand up from the swing and sit down again in a way that would grant him more space for his guitar without continually bumping into the iron cable of the swing. However, while sitting down again, he noticed that something had slipped out of his pocket. He instantly realised it could only be the letters, so he was quick to stand up again and pick them up from the dusty ground below.

John, who had stopped his humming to see why Brian had paused the guitar playing, now looked up at Brian as he carefully blew the sand off his precious mail. ‘Maybe you should put them in the inside of your coat.’

Brian nodded at this proposal, and stuffed his guitar under his left elbow to drag down the zipper of his coat. He searched the fleece lining of the coat to see if there was some sort of inside pocket, and when he found it, he brought up his hand to put the letters inside of it. He could not do this, however, without taking a look at the letters; when they had fallen on the ground they had rearranged, meaning he was now looking at a different letter than the one he had previously seen. The stationary was still without a doubt that of his mother, but the date was different; whereas the previous one had been sent somewhere in March, this letter had a date significantly closer to the time Brian was currently finding himself at. He stared a the cream-white rectangular envelope with a perfectly inked stamp in the right corner for a moment, wondering if this letter could be as fresh as having been sent the day before.

‘Something wrong?’

It was only when John called out to him that Brian realised he had been staring at the back of letters for a while, and he was quick to continue putting them into the inner pocket of his coat.

‘No, nothing. Just… What date is it?’ he asked absent-mindedly.

‘I have no idea. The 25th or so?’ John guessed.

The 25th. This letter had been marked on the 24th. Could it really be that this was a brand-new letter, one which his parents had just written to him and sent out in the hopes that they would finally get a reply this time? How many of these letters had been sent to him by his parents?

Brian turned half away from John to take the letters out of his coat again, and quickly let his forefinger slip past them to count how many there were. Ten letters he counted; in his speed he could not see exactly how many had been written to him by his parents, but he was rather sure he recognised at least two different envelope types and stationaries, meaning that some other people also must have written him. Who on earth could this be? Family members, neighbours, or friends from university? How many people even knew that he was here? He had dropped out of uni a little while before he was sent to the clinic, and though he had stayed in touch with a few people through those few months, he had never sent any of them his address from this place. As far as he was concerned, no one but his parents knew where he was staying at right now, but chances were his mother had told some of his aunts or his grandmother where he was. Being alone at home all day now, she had probably turned to some family members for comfort now that her only son had left the house to be placed into a psychiatric hospital, or whatever one wanted to call this place, and from whom she had not heard anything for the past five weeks. Brian felt as if someone had punched him in the gut; sure, he had felt isolated at this place at times, but he had never really considered how it would feel for people at the other side of the line. For his parents, his family, neighbours, friends, as far as he had any of those left - he had disappeared behind the walls without a trace. Even if they had managed to get by his address, policies and regulations had ensured that he had not received their efforts at getting in touch until this very moment, let alone that he could have sent them back a reply. How would these people feel? Would they fear that he didn’t want to be in touch with them, didn’t even read their letters? Or did they fear he had sunk down into a deep depression again, and had gotten too low to bother about social contact with anyone?

‘What are you thinking of?’

At the sound of John’s voice, Brian was quick to take the small stack of letters, fold them double again, and push them inside his coat again. ‘Of what people must be thinking. Some of these letters have been put on hold for weeks, and I’ve never had the opportunity to tell them why I didn’t reply,’ Brian said quickly. He tried to push the letters into the inside pocket of his borrowed coat, but this was not easy while holding on to a guitar and at the same time having to curl his arm around the iron cable to make sure he would not fall off the swing and embarrass himself even more than he already had to this point. Damnit, why wouldn’t those stupid letters just fit?

‘Why don’t you open them up and read them? I won’t mind,’ John said, but his voice sounded a bit too cool and standoffish for Brian to believe him. He couldn’t blame John for feeling that way either - he had made a promise to go outside and jam with him, not to sit here reading five weeks’ worth of letters while John would sit next to him on a crappy swing to enjoy himself with nothing.

‘No, I’ll save them for tonight,’ Brian said as he gave up on neatly arranging the letters and simply closed his coat over them in the hopes that they would stay in the place he had assigned for them. ‘We were playing While My Guitar Gently Weeps, right?’

‘Yes, we were,’ John said, sounding a bit more confident again. ‘Should I hum the tune again?’

‘Please,’ Brian said, relieved that John was still enthusiastic about the jamming that had still not seriously gone down until that moment. There was something about the letters that seemed to make John uncomfortable, and the last thing Brian wanted to do was do anything that would make John feel bad. He could understand his roommate’s feelings, though; he would probably not be too happy if the tables would have turned and John would be the one to receive ten letters while he would have been empty handed. But why did he not just check? How could you know you would have nothing if you did not check your mailbox? Or was it just self-protection, and did John not open his mailbox to prevent himself from being disappointed if it indeed turned out to be empty?

They played for a few minutes or so, during which Brian tried to remember the tune of the song John had requested but during which he was more focussed on the letters. Not only did he constantly have to readjust his position to try and make sure they would not fall out of the pocket into which he had shove them, but he also felt their presence more intensely with every passing second. He was wondering who had sent them, when they had arrived, and of course, what the contents of them would be. Would it be his mother sobbing her heart out on paper, or his father telling him to stay strong? Would some of his friends have managed to reach out to him? And if they had, what would they have written? Had they been shocked upon finding out he had been taken into a mental institution, or had they expected something the like, given his absence at school the last few months? Would they ask him when he would return, or did they-

‘You’re distracted,’ John remarked matter-of-factly, causing Brian to instantly halt the movements of his fingers and glance at his friend. He opened his mouth to say something to counter this observation, but since they both knew it was true, he could not come up with anything useful to say.

‘I’m sorry. It’s just… Those letters took me by surprise. I can’t stop thinking about who sent them and when, and what they’re writing,’ Brian mumbled.

‘Then go on and have a look at them,’ John said. ‘What’s holding you back?’

 _You_ , Brian thought to himself, but there was no way he was going to say it as plainly as that. ‘Well… I would feel bad for you if I would sit here reading letters while you sit here…’

‘Watching you enjoy your mail. It’s fine, really,’ John said, and he even produced a bit of a smile along with this sentence. ‘Come, go have a look. I’ll hold your guitar,’ John said, already reaching out to take hold of the instrument Brian was still clinging on to.

‘Thank you,’ Brian said as he handed over his guitar to its original owner. He still was not entirely convinced that John would not feel lonely if he would sit here and read his mail, but his friend had confirmed twice by now that he did not mind, so maybe he really didn’t. Either way, Brian had already given up his guitar, so there was not really a way back now. Unzipping his coat once again, Brian collected the letters from the inside pocket, and started flicking through the small pile to see which ones he wanted to read first.

‘I’m not going to read all of them right now,’ he hastily said to John, who already looked a bit desolate, sitting on the swing with Brian’s guitar in his lap and staring at the ground below him in the same gloomy fashion as he used to do when staring at the ceiling of their bedroom.

‘Read as many as you like,’ John replied invitingly, yet still Brian felt a sense of guilt when he searched through his mail to find the letters he deemed most worthy of his attention by now.

‘You can play some tunes on my guitar if you want to,’ Brian offered in an attempt to find something to keep John busy while he looked at his mail, but John shrugged this off, forcing Brian to come up with new ways to make sure John would not feel put aside. ‘Let’s see…’ Brian said out loud. ‘Five of these are written by my mother, so let me just pick the latest one to have a look at. And then there are two letters with the same handwriting, but I don’t really recognise it. Nor do I recognise this one. And this here…’ Brian flipped over a letter. ‘I think one of my aunts or so. I’ll see about that later,’ he said, pushing it back to the end of the pile. ‘Then this one… It looks kind of official. It wasn’t hand-written, but has my name printed on it.’

John looked up. ‘Does it have a sender on it?’

‘London Hospital. I wonder what they have to tell me? I haven’t been there in ages…’ Putting the rest of the letters on his lap, Brian carefully tore open the envelope to reveal a typed letter inside of it. The moment he turned it over and saw the signature at the bottom of the paper, he immediately knew what it was from.

‘It’s from professor Sumner. My former psychiatrist, he operated under their name,’ he said with a grimace as he awkwardly folded the letter back into the envelope.

‘The one who used you as a guinea pig and put all your records out for the world to see?’ John asked.

‘Yes, that one,’ Brian confirmed, staring at the torn envelope in his hands. He had hoped to finally be free from the man, but apparently his old psychiatrist still seemed to want control over him even now that he was no longer his patient.

 _Forget it. You are no longer his patient. He has nothing to say about you,_ Brian thought to himself. With that in mind, Brian tore the letter into half.

‘I’m not reading this. He doesn’t have anything to say about me anymore. I won’t let him,’ Brian said, sounding more resolute than he felt inside. Luckily, John seemed to have the last spark of confidence that was needed to get clear of the letter which Brian lacked at that exact moment.

‘Oh, that’s the spirit,’ John said with a smile as he reached over to take the remains of the letters from Brian, who seemed to be not too sure what to do with them. Standing up from the swing, John walked towards the bin with the words: ‘He can leave his head on. He’s no longer in charge of you.’ The letter disappeared into the iron bin, and Brian felt a sense of relief washing through him.

‘Thanks,’ he said to John, who just smiled in response.

‘No need to. That’s what friends are for. Now, go and read a letter of someone you actually want to hear about,’ he told Brian, who immediately carried out the task he had been set to. He picked up one of the letters written in a boyish stationary he did not immediately recognise, but as he went to open it, he noticed that the letter had been taped shut and that it looked torn and frayed.

‘Has somebody opened this before?’ he asked somewhat rhetorically, and John slowly looked up from the ground to see what he was talking about.

‘Oh yeah, safety measures. All non-confidential letters will be opened and read to check for escape plans, money, drugs, and the like,’ John said as if it was nothing, and Brian had to admit that it no longer surprised him either.

‘Sure. Who needs privacy anyway,’ he commented, but his bitterness towards Queen Mary’s policies soon disappeared as snow on a sunny day when he saw who had sent him the letter.

‘It’s from Ben and Peter, two friends of mine. Classmates. I mean… Not exactly sure in which category they fall, but I knew them from school. We studied together for three years,’ Brian explained as he further unfolded the paper to be able to read the bottom part of the letter. It was not an incredibly long mail, but it was a sweet one; not only for all the good wished they sent him, but also for the fact that they had taken the time and effort to find out where he was and what was going down in his life. It gave Brian a sense of relief to know that he still had people out there who were looking out for him; people of his age, _friends_ even, perhaps, who had not forgotten him and hoped he was doing as well as possible in the given circumstances.

‘This is really sweet,’ he said with a soft smile on his face as he reread the letter. ‘So these are people I know from uni who tell me they missed me and went to call my parents to ask why they didn’t hear anything from me, and when my mum told them I had been taken here, they asked for my address and everything to sent me letters. It appears they sent more,’ he said when he recognised the handwriting of one of the boys on a different envelope.

‘That’s kind of them,’ John agreed with him. Encouraged by this letter of university friends, Brian opened up the letter with the similar handwriting to find that Ben and Peter had sent him a second letter asking him if everything was going well, and if he had received their previous letter. Then there was a letter from one of his astrophysics professors, with a somewhat similar story of having gone around to find out where he had gone, and being shocked upon finding he had been admitted into a mental clinic. He wished him all the best and hoped he would come back to pick up his studies in due time, but that he might first be given all the time and space he needed to recover. Brian was touched by the kindness and patience of the letters he had read so far, but when he opened up one of the letters sent to him by his parents, he began to sense that he might not hold up without tearing for very much longer. He glanced at his right to find that John was still sitting next to him on the swing rocking back and forth for a bit, and he folded open the letter to see what his mother had written.

_My dearest boy,_

_No one ever could have prepared me for how hard it would be to have to go without you for so long. I had been telling myself for years that I should get myself used to the idea of you moving out of house eventually, something I dreaded, but right now I’m finding that I wished you had just left home to go and live on yourself instead of being taken in at a place so far away. Not being able to drop by or give you a ring when I feel like hearing from you is the worst thing for a mother who misses her child, so I just sit here with the phone next to me all day, hoping you’ll be allowed to phone us again sometimes. Half of the letters I’m writing to you I’m not shipping out - I promised myself not to send you more than once a week, especially since you told me you had not received an of the ones your father and me had sent you. I’m hoping this one will finally get through; I think about you night and day, and the thought of you sitting there at Queen Mary’s all alone without anyone you know around to turn to, keeps me up at night-_

‘Are you alright?’ John’s voice suddenly reached out to him, pulling Brian out of the letter he had been reading. He saw ever-expanding circles of water staining the ink on the paper, and it was only when he brought up his hand to his cheek that he noticed he had started to tear up.

‘Yes, I am. It’s just… these letters, it’s touching to see people out there still think about me,’ Brian said, wiping a line of tears from his cheek with the back of his hand.

‘Of course they think about you, what else did you expect?’ John said with a bit of a smile. ‘You are loved, Brian. Of course people think about you. Of course they will reach out to you.’

‘I just... I had forgotten about the entire possibility of letters, and I didn’t expect that people would actually… I’m sorry,’ Brian apologised when tears started coming down again.

‘Come on, you need a hug,’ John decided. He stood up from the swing and, with Brian’s guitar still in hands, he crouched down in front of the swing Brian was sitting on to wrap his arms firmly around his friend’s torso. Burying his face in John’s long tresses and clutching on to him tightly, Brian felt better than he had felt all week; for a week it must have been since he had found himself sitting next to John in the cave, sharing one coat between the pair of them and sitting close to each other for warmth. It seemed both as if it had been years, and at the same time Brian remembered it as if it had happened only yesterday. The passing of time at Queen Mary’s could be so peculiar at times; on the one hand Brian still felt like he was the newbie whenever he was the only one to look up from a food fight in the canteen, and yet when he sat here with John, he felt as if he had known him for ages, as if he had been in his life since the beginning of time, and as if he was never going to leave again.

‘Thank you,’ Brian said when John at last broke away from him, feeling warm and dizzy with happiness and emotion. In a moment of unexpected openness and the desire to share his happiness with John, he proposed to him: ‘Do you want to hear what my mum wrote?’

‘Of course,’ John agreed as he stood up again, circled around the swing, and stood behind Brian to be able to read the lines with him as Brian read them out loud. Whereas the first part of the letter indeed was rather emotional, with his mother describing how much she missed him and couldn’t sleep at night at the thought of him being so far away from home, the letter soon turned to lighter subjects. Brian blushed a bit when he read out loud how his mother described how she and two of his aunts had pair a visit to a ‘magnificent flower shop’ where they sold ‘the most beautiful dahlias she had ever seen’, but John and he were soon able to share a laugh over the story of how she had accidentally poured nutmeg into her apple pie instead of cinnamon, and how the entire family had coughed their lungs out after having taken the first bite. The letter ended by his mother announcing that his father would come up to write something, and Brian and John had to bend a lot closer over the paper to figure out which of his scribbles were supposed to represent which letters. In the end they figured out it was a part about how he missed Brian being around each night, how had gotten promotion at work, and how he had managed to get his hands on a few astrology books he hoped Brian would be interested in - he could bring them along as soon as the would be allowed to come and visit him, which his dad hoped would be soon.

‘We hope that this letter will finally get through and if not, we will try and send another one next week. We won’t give up until they give in. Love always, mum and dad,’ Brian read the closing sentences of his parents’ letter, after which he folded it double and looked at John over his shoulder with a smile on his face. ‘That was nice, wasn’t it?’

‘Very nice indeed,’ John agreed as he stepped over to his own swing again, where he sat down on again, still keeping Brian’s guitar close to his body. The smile on Brian’s face lasted for another moment as he scanned over the letter again, and it only faded when he noticed that John had fallen back into his silent composure again. Putting the letter into the envelope and stuffing it back into the pocket of his coat again, Brian fumbled for a way to address John. He had hoped that reading him a letter might make him feel better for a moment, and while it seemed to have done so while they had been reading of his mother’s adventures with the nutmeg, it now seemed to leave John more quiet than before. Brian knew John did not appreciate being meddled with, but he knew there was something about the letters - or rather the lack of letters - John received, and he could not stay quiet about it any longer.

‘John?’ he asked softly.

‘Yes?’ John said, kicking his left shoe against a clump of sand on the ground below his feet. It crumbled into a thousand little sand grains that spread more or less evenly over the grass next to the swing set. Brian took a deep breath before he asked the question he had been having on his mind.

‘Don’t you ever get letters?’

John’s swing stopped moving when John abruptly put his feet against the ground; Brian could see the knuckles of his hands tightening around the cables of the swing. For a moment Brian feared John would turn ice cold again, just like he had done when Brian had proposed he’d look into his mailbox earlier that morning, but John stayed surprisingly calm when he answered: ‘I might. But they’re not getting through.’

‘Why not?’ Brian found himself asking before he could even think about it.

John shrugged as if he did not know, but he replied nevertheless a few seconds later. ‘I don’t have the privileges to send or receive post.’

‘Really? But I thought, since you could order a guitar-’ Brian thought out loud, but when John interrupted him hallway through, he realised he was pushing his luck and John’s patience.

‘Really not, no,’ John insisted. ‘They took that away because I didn’t show up to meetings with my psychiatrist multiple times because I didn’t feel like it. Such as last week.’

Brian nodded, but still was not entirely convinced; after over five weeks at this place, he had figured out just about how the privilege point system worked. Privileges gained could be spent on ordering things or on spending more time on the phone or having people over in the visiting room; things that alternately also could be taken away when one behaved badly. The ‘offense’ John had committed by not always showing up to meetings with his psychiatrist, however, were nowhere near as bad to have the most basic privileges of sending or receiving letters taken away from one. If people like Drew - who went around bullying half of the patients and who started a fight at least three times a week, or Roger for that matter, who had been busted using drugs multiple times, were still allowed to write and receive mail - then there was no way someone gentle and quiet like John would be cut off from society for not always making it to his appointments. Besides, it seemed to Brian that cutting someone with an antisocial behaviour disorder off from the outside world would not so much be a punishment but a reward, and that if _he_ could figure this out, then surely trained staff of a mental institution could put one and one together and not isolate John from the few contacts he had.

Nevertheless, John had averted his face from Brian, and Brian had understood his unspoken message that he preferred not to talk about whatever the reason was for not checking his mail box or not receiving any mail. If John wanted to talk about it, he knew he could reach out to him any moment he wanted to; therefore Brian decided to let the subject go.

‘It’s okay. Let’s go back to jamming, alright? We should still have about half an hour before lunch time,’ Brian proposed, to which John nodded. The guitar was handed back over him by John, who then sat down on his own swing again and looked at Brian with some sort of expectancy on his face. He probably was glad to go back to jamming, but Brian could not help having to say one more thing concerning the post-matter before he would be able to let go of it. ‘And John?’

‘Yes?’

‘You’ll get some mail one of these days. Mark my words,’ Brian said confidently, after which he set in on the opening tune of _All Along The Watchtower_ before John could ask or say anything more.

# # #

After having dropped that perhaps somewhat too obvious hint that something was about to be coming up, Brian desperately hoped that the parcel he had ordered for John would be delivered somewhere soon. He would have hated for John to get his hoped up over something he had vaguely promised and then not have his words come true. Luckily enough for him, it was only a few days later when the item he had hoped for arrived at Queen Mary’s.

It was on a Friday afternoon when all of them had assembled in their bedroom. The weather was cold and it had been drizzling all morning, and it was overall not nice to be outside right then - and Freddie had been banned from the fitness room for having manage to lose a dangerous amount of weight over the last few weeks, meaning that none of them really had any other place to hang out at other than at their dormitory. Letters had just come in that morning; two had arrived for Brian, and one for Freddie and Roger each. Brian seemed to be the only one really interested in them, though; Freddie had quickly read his and thrown it into the drawer of his nightstand with the words that he would take care of it later, and Roger was doodling all over the envelope instead of replying to his. They had both found more interest in discussing music; Roger had used his pencils to drum the rhythm of some Led Zeppelin song that sounded vaguely familiar to Brian, and Freddie had soon set in on the vocals. They soon concluded that they needed actual instruments, though, and it was not long before they reached out to Brian to provide them.

‘Brian, darling, won’t you accompany us on guitar?’ Freddie asked.

‘I’d rather reply to this letter first,’ Brian said absent-mindedly, just having put pen to paper in an attempt to write to his cousin what had happened that had landed him into the situation he was in.

‘But you can do that at any later moment!’ Roger protested.

‘We can also play music at any later moment,’ Brian replied.

‘Well, people won’t be happy if we play the _Immigrant Song_ at ten thirty tonight,’ Roger said.

‘Since when would that not be all the more reason to play the _Immigrant Song_ in the middle of the night to you?’ John piped up from the other side of the room. Brian could not oppress a chuckle at John’s unexpected cleverness. Or well, unexpected - he had grown to get used to John mingling into the conversation when one had nearly forgotten about his presence, which Brian thought made it all the more funny when he _did_ comment on something from out of the blue.

‘It’s not as if I would play music in the middle of the night with the sole purpose to annoy people…’ Roger said, at which all of his roommates looked up at him to give him a sceptical glance. Freddie seemed to be the first to open his mouth and probably say something to put his boyfriend into his place, but at that exact moment, a knock on the door turned the attention of all four of them away from the topic of whether or not Roger loved annoying people and towards the question of who could be reaching out for them.

‘If it’s going to be another room search, I’m not leaving my bed,’ John grumbled as he turned around and buried his head under a pillow.

‘I’ll go,’ Freddie offered when no one else did, and he got up from the bed. Brian watched from the corner of his eyes as Freddie’s twig-like arms undid the lock on their door, but it was only when his roommate practically shouted the name of their mentor that he really started paying attention.

‘Nolan! What brings you here, dear?’ Freddie exclaimed characteristically, while Nolan remained calm and unaffected as usual.

‘Hi, Freddie. I’m just playing the mailman today, I’ve come to drop off a parcel for Brian.’

At those words Brian was finally willing to put down his pen, and he looked up to see his mentor holding a big, rectangular box which - as far as he was concerned - could only be one thing. He pushed all the stationary tools he had been holding in his lap off to his mattress and stood up to walk over to Nolan, who gave him a smile as he handed him over the parcel.

‘I don’t know too much about this, but it seems like a really pretty one. Chestnut wood, made in France. If this won’t do it…’ Nolan said with a glance into the direction of John’s bed, from which some sounds of movement emerged, suggesting that even John had started to pay attention to their unexpected visitor.

‘Thanks, Nolan,’ Brian said with a smile, hands shaking a bit in nervousness and excitement when he finally held the item he had been looking out for for a while in hands.

‘What are you two up to?’ Freddie asked with one eyebrow raised in curiosity, but as if per Brian’s request, Nolan hardly even looked up at him, let alone that he answered him.

Instead, all the staff member did was put one hand on Brian’s shoulder and said: ‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ before he said his goodbyes and took his leave, leaving a smiling Brian and a confused Freddie standing in the doorway.

‘What was that about, dear?’ Freddie asked Brian with ill-hidden curiosity, following Brian close behind when his roommate made his way over to his bed again. This time however, Brian walked around it and sat down on the side that faced John, who - as the previous sounds had indicated - had removed the pillow from his head and had propped himself up on his elbows, looking on inquisitively as Brian sat down on his side of the bed in front of him.

‘Just something I ordered. For John, that is,’ Brian said, at which words John looked at him with a quizzical, perhaps somewhat sceptical look in his eyes.

‘For John?’ With those words Brian also seemed to have grabbed the attention of Roger, who let his body slip off his own bed and who was quick to join Brian on his mattress.

‘He got me a guitar, so I decided I had to do something back for him,’ was all the explanation Brian offered to the bystanders, before he reached the box out towards his roommate, who now propped himself up in an actual sitting position.

‘You didn’t have to…’ John started off feebly, but Brian was having none of it.

‘Of course I had to. I wanted you to have this,’ he said with a smile as he put the box into John’s hands. He accepted the gift, but seemed a bit too baffled to even know what to do with it, let alone to react to it and open it.

‘What is it?’ Roger asked impatiently, jumping from Brian’s bed over to that of John so he could be closer to the source of all excitement when John would reveal its contents.

‘You should open it, Deaky,’ Freddie encouraged a hesitant-looking John, who seemed to have had no intentions of moving a single muscle anywhere soon since the box had been handed over to him.

‘I… Yes, I think I should…’ John stumbled over his own words, before he inspected the box as to find the right spot to open it up at. Roger, impatient as always, pointed out the tape line where it could easily be ripped off, and John hesitantly followed his fingers.

‘Someone’s clearly not used to getting presents,’ Freddie winked at Brian, who could not take his eyes off of John. It had never really occurred to him, but usual moments of gift exchange - such as birthday parties or Christmas - were likely to be skipped at a place like this, especially to a person who preferred not to place any public importance on himself such as John. For all Brian knew, this could have been the first present John could have received in his by now twenty-one month long stay at Queen Mary’s.

‘I hope you’ll like it,’ Brian said to cut the tension in the suddenly awfully quiet room, in which only the sound of tape being ripped off of carton was audible.

‘Oh, he’d like everything you give him as long as it comes from you,’ Freddie said with a smirk of which Brian was glad John was too absorbed in his presence to notice. It sure bordered the line of what could be said about his affection for their quietest roommate, and what would have been a blatant hint of him being in love with John. He didn’t get too much time to think about the comment either, though - for John had removed all the tape, and was now unpuzzling the paper sides to reveal what was inside. He was, of course, the first person to see what Brian had ordered for him - and upon the sight of it, it seemed as if he froze, completely fixated on the instrument.

‘And? And?’ Roger insisted, leaning over and trying if he could peek over the edge of the box. Brian felt the urge to tell him to stay in his lane and let John look at his present on his own first, but when Freddie also stepped over to have a glance, he decided to let them be. They were enthusiastic too, after all, and he did not want to be the one to take away from their excitement.

‘Oh my God, is that…’ Freddie seemed half speechless when John at last produced the instrument from the box it had been hidden in until then, but he could rely on his boyfriend to take it from there.

‘A guitar! No wait, it’s a bass guitar!’ Roger corrected himself, eyes wide with surprise and enthusiasm as he smiled at the bass John was fixated on. Brian waited for John to react to it, either with words or expressions, or anything, really, other from sitting there looking at it as if he had never seen a bass guitar before. This change was not made, however, or at least not before Freddie demanded Brian’s attention and drew him away from his object of interest.

‘My God, Brian! How on _earth_ did you get that?’

‘Privilege points,’ Brian shrugged. ‘There was a reason I was helping out at the kitchen and the laundry room all the time these last few weeks,’ he smiled.

‘You sly devil!’ Freddie reproved him, though it was hardly worth calling it that - he sounded as if he was all in favour of Brian’s secret plan, and as if he could not believe he had not sooner thought of arranging a similar scheme. At that moment, however, Brian was not too interested in what Freddie or Roger or whoever else thought about what he had done and how he had gotten around it - all he cared about was what the receiver of the gift thought of it.

‘And? Do you like it?’ Brian asked as he bent a little closer towards John, who - now having removed the instrument from the box completely - still seemed star struck by it.

‘I… I don’t know what to say,’ John eventually stammered, audible only to those who paid close attention to him.

‘Of course he likes it!’ Freddie exclaimed on behalf of John, as if it was the most stupid question he had ever heard. ‘God, this is amazing! Now John’ll finally be able to play with us!’ Freddie had the most radiant smile on his face as he seemed to overthink the possibilities now that they had two people for the rhythm section, one guitarist, and a singer-songwriter such as himself.

‘I never knew you could play, John!’ Roger suddenly remarked in the midst of the whole chaos. ‘Why didn’t you _tell_ us?’ he said with an equally shining expression on his face. John, in the meantime, still was not showing any sort of reaction, and Brian was starting to worry about him.

‘John...?’ he asked softly, bending yet a bit closer towards the person he was trying to reach out to. John looked up at him shortly, and though this moment lasted no longer than half a second, Brian could swear he could see a look of pain in his eyes.

‘You shouldn’t have done this, Brian,’ John told him, still clinging on to the bass as if it would explode if he would not hold it in the exact same fashion as he had done so far.

‘Of course I should. You helped me through my… you know, through difficult times when you gave me that guitar. Now it’s my turn to do something for you,’ Brian explained softly. He heard various ‘ahw’ and ‘how sweet’-like comments from the other couple, but John remained quiet. When he eventually did speak, it was something that surprised Brian.

‘I’m sorry. It’s very kind of you, really, but I- I cannot accept it.’

‘There’s no need to be so modest,’ Freddie rolled his eyes. ‘I know that’s just you, but really, Brian has already given it to you. There’s no need to be so reserved about it.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ John said as he carefully put the instrument back into its original package. ‘I can’t accept this. It’s… I know you meant well, but I can’t have it.’ When Brian managed to cross eyes with John, he was almost positive he could see tears in them.

‘What are you talking about, Deaks?’ Freddie asked him, clearly not understanding what his roommate was about. He did not get much time to figure it out - neither of them did, for that matter - either; John, now no longer allowing anyone to see his face, closed the folds of the box and placed it next to him on the mattress.

‘I’m sorry,’ John apologised again. ‘I need to- I need a moment.’ Before anyone could say or ask anything, he had stood up from his bed and sneaked past Freddie. Brian was left speechless as he watched his crush quicken his pace and rush towards the door, which he pulled open with more force than would have been necessary. 

‘Where are you going?’ Freddie asked him surprisedly, but chances of John having heard it were slim; just when the last syllable left his lips, the door was closed with a dull thud, leaving the remaining three in a deafening silence and a haze of confusion.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Roger asked with more than a mild frown of misunderstanding on his face. Brian could sense that he was looking at him, but he could not bring himself to look back or to open his mouth and explain something that he was only just starting to understand himself.

‘Is he out of his _mind_?’ Freddie asked in complete indignation, but Brian knew that he wasn’t. Oh no, far from it. If anyone was out of their mind, it would be him for presenting John with a bass guitar in the middle of a group of people he deliberately did not tell about his hobby because it reminds him of all that he lost when he got here too much.

‘I’ll go and talk to him,’ Freddie said when it remained silent for a while, but Brian shook his head resolutely and got up from the bed.

‘No, let me go. I need to apologise.’

‘What for?’ Roger asked, sounding more and more confused with every passing second. ‘What would _you_ have to apologise for?’

‘Long story. It’s- I just need to talk to him,’ Brian said, dazedly grasping into the direction of the bass guitar and taking it out of its box. He was not entirely sure if he should take it, but he wanted John to be given the opportunity to reconsider accepting the gift in the absence of everyone else.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Freddie stated, but Brian was quick to put him off.

‘No,’ he said curtly - a bit too curtly perhaps, because Freddie looked a bit hurt after this bitter sounding rejection. ‘Please, it’s kind, but I need a word with him in private.’

‘But I-’

‘Let Brian do what he thinks is best, Freddie.’ Brian had not expected this assistance from Roger, but it made him all the more grateful towards him for supporting him, especially since the boy did not seem to completely understand his cause.

‘Thank you,’ Brian said with a nod towards Roger, after which he swiftly turned around without another word and walked towards the door. He knew Freddie was not happy with his decision to leave on his own, might feel rejected, but at the moment he could not bring himself to care enough about this to actually do something about it. He would go and talk to Freddie later, once he had solved the situation with John.

If he could solve it after having messed up so badly.

The door Brian threw shut behind him to block out the sound of Freddie wondering why his offer of help had been rejected loudly enough for the neighbours to overhear, and he made his way downstairs. It was remarkably quiet in the hallways; he assumed people either had therapy, corvee, or had locked themselves up in their rooms like they had done until a moment before. He was glad not too many people were around, though - so many things were going through his head, so many thoughts about John and how to approach him after his crush had fled the room, that he was afraid his head would burst if he was to encounter anyone he knew right now who would do as much as just say ‘hello’ to him.

Luckily, he saw no one he knew on the stairs and in the hallways - and more importantly, nobody out there saw him, so he safely arrived at the exit. The single warden who was guarding it was the only one who recognised him, and jovially called out to him for having ‘only just missed his friend’. Brian did his best to smile at this; he was glad to hear that his instinct had been correct and that John indeed had fled outside, but he felt and indescribable nervousness when the guard leisurely noted down his personal data, and released him with the message that he should call out to ‘the other one’ for ‘having slipped past me without stopping to check himself out.’ This was only more confirmation that John was upset, _very_ upset, and it was all his fault.

When he was dismissed after what felt like an eternity, Brian paced towards the door and swung it open in one quick movement. When he went outside he immediately noticed how he trod into muddy grass; the rain had lasted all through the night and now continued to manifest itself in the form of a light drizzle. It took no more than a dozen of steps through the wasteland of soggy grass for the water to seep through the thin fabric of Brian’s shoes - which, though it hardly felt comfortable, was last of his concerns right now. He could and would walk miles through seeping rain to reach John if he would have had to.

Still, he was glad it was no more than perhaps a hundred metres before he arrived at his destination; not because he was unwilling to walk any further, but because every second he spent apart from John knowing he had been the one to upset him was breaking him inside. The moment he reached the right side of the wall in which the secret getaway was located, he needed one second to take a breath and compose himself. He did not know in which condition he would find John, but however he would be, he had to be strong enough to take it and comfort him.

Brian found himself reaching out a hand to knock on the wall that granted access, but it had little effect; it only produced a light sound that he barely heard himself, let alone that John would be able to overhear it from the other side of the wall. Besides that, he noticed the brick door had not been closed properly; it was standing slightly ajar. He imagined John had done whatever had been in his might to close himself off from the outside world as best as he could, but had given up on perfecting the task halfway through. The door was heavy and there was no one out here to see him anyway; no one apart from Brian, that was.

‘John?’ Brian called out, softly at first but with an increasingly louder voice when he was given no reply. ‘John, can I come in? I know you’re in there.’ There came no reply from the other side, but at the same time, also no signal appeared that would indicate that John absolutely did not want him to enter the cave. ‘I’m coming in, okay?’ Brian warned him, before he gently pushed open the door.

What he found at the other side of the wall was something he knew he should have expected but which nevertheless broke his heart; at the opposite side of the cave, in the corner of two walls was John, sitting motionlessly in the wet, sandy ground, his head resting against the wall next to him and not reacting to his friend when he entered.

‘John…’ Brian managed to choke out, before he stepped into the narrow inlet, not caring to close the door behind him but rapidly pacing over to his friend, who looked more desolate than he had seen him be in quite a long time. He had no idea what he was going to do once he would near him; he supposed that throwing his arms around him or being physically close in any other way would only be counterproductive at the moment. John had never been one for physical intimacy, and right now did not seem like the moment to start with this, either.

‘John, I’m so sorry,’ Brian whispered as he knelt down in front of his friend as much as possible - the space was too narrow to allow two people to sit opposite of each other, so he ended up sitting half across from him. ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t think things through when I gave you that box. I should have discussed it with you first, whether you wanted Freddie and Roger to know, whether you even wanted a bass guitar in the first place-’

‘Stop, Brian,’ John softly cut him off mid-sentence without looking up at him; he was still staring at the bricks in front of him, too far away in his own mind to really notice anything besides them. It made Brian fear for the worst; that he had broken the trust there had been between the pair of them, that he had damaged John by ‘outing’ his secret talent in front of their roommates to the extent where John did not even want to hear his voice again, or at the very least not for now. 

‘I’m sorry,’ Brian whispered. ‘If there’s anything I can do to make it better…’ he proposed, but he did not finish his own sentence; he did not know how to. Besides that, it seemed highly implausible to him that it would make any difference at this point. What could he offer John to make things easier after the painful mistake he had made?

‘If you want me to leave…?’ he proposed, already propping himself up on his hands to catch the attention of the boy who was still aimlessly staring at the bricks in front of him. He looked desolate beyond words, with that empty glow in his eyes and the rain drizzling down on him. Brian could not bear to leave him in this state, but if that was what John wanted, he figured he had no choice but to do as he told him. That was the least he could do for him now, he figured.

Much to his surprise, however, John now averted his eyes from the wall to look at him as he said: ‘No, stay. I want you to stay.’ When Brian took a while to reply, a soft ‘please?’ followed.

‘Of course. Of course I’ll stay,’ Brian answered, crouching down on the soggy ground again and looking at John in expectancy.

‘Thank you,’ John whispered. He looked down again, and he managed to surprise Brian even more when he softly said: ‘I’m sorry for what I just did.’

‘What should you be sorry for?’ Brian asked, feeling now just about as lost as Freddie and Roger had been moments ago. First John ran out on him for having outed his secret, and now he was the one to apologise while Brian had come out here to do this to him? ‘I was the one who let Freddie and Roger in on you playing music even though you told me to keep it a secret.’

‘I don’t mind that, really,’ John said.

‘You… don’t?’ Brian asked, cocking one eyebrow by now.

‘It’s probably about time they knew,’ John said with a shrug, a small smile visible on his lips.

‘But then… if not for that, then why did you leave?’ Brian asked him carefully. John now detached himself from the wall he had seemed to have been glued to, and patted on the muddy ground next to him. Despite the dirt, Brian did not hesitate to sit down next to his friend, feeling better already when the warmth of John’s shoulder touched his.

‘It’s just that…’ John looked uncomfortable and shifted in his place as he wrapped his arms around his knees. ‘I was just too surprised to know what to do. I couldn’t handle it at the moment, and with Freddie and Roger around…’

‘I know,’ Brian said when John fell silent. ‘I shouldn’t have given it to you all of a sudden, in the midst of all those others. I should have thought that through, but when the parcel arrived, I was just too enthusiastic, I think,’ he said, ending his sentence in a mumble.

‘That’s okay. I remember how I felt when I gave you the guitar I ordered,’ John said, and a smile grew on his face again. ‘To see that look on your face when you first held it… I hadn’t felt happiness like that in a long time. Which is also why I’m so sorry for running out when you tried to return the favour. I’m really sorry, Brian. It’s just that it’s been so long…’ John’s voice softened towards the end, and when Brian looked up at him, he could see tears in the eyes of his friend.

‘Oh, John…’ Brian felt as if someone had just crushed his heart into a million pieces. He wished he could hold John, hold him as close to his body as the space between them would allow, but out of his fear for doing anything that might upset the boy even more, all he dared to do was throw an arm around John’s shoulder. When John himself, however, reacted to this by turning towards him and burying his face in the space between Brian’s neck and shoulder, he allowed himself to throw both arms around his friend and hold him tightly while silent tears dripped onto the thin fabric of his shirt.

‘It’s okay. It’s okay,’ Brian mumbled. He was a bit overwhelmed by John’s breakdown; certainly, John had comforted him before in the midst of his darkest hours, but it suddenly struck him that he had never seen John do as much as shed a tear. All the same, he decided that the best he could do would be to just cling on to him until John would give an indication that he did not want to be held any longer, and simply stroke his back to silently let him know he was not alone.

Brian did not know whether ten seconds or ten minutes had passed by the time John carefully detached himself from his grip. It was only when he drew back his body from his chest that Brian started feeling the cold; the drizzle had increased in heaviness, and the shoulders and upper side of their grey shirts had been visibly wettened by it. Brian hoped his hair would remain mildly decent through the assault of the rain, but even if it wouldn’t he didn’t really mind. He had more important matters on his mind, such as carefully looking on as John, looking more vulnerable than he had ever seen him do before, put himself together again.

‘I’m sorry. It’s just been so long,’ John sniffed, wiping a line of tears from his cheek with the back of his hand. ‘I didn’t think I would ever be given the… the opportunity to play again. Or at least not while in here,’ he admitted.

‘That’s okay,’ Brian comforted him. It was then that he suddenly recalled that he still had the guitar with him; he had discarded it to his left hand and consequently had placed it against the brick wall when John required both his arms at the same time. Now that they got back to the topic of the actual instrument again, Brian could not help bringing it up again. He needed to know if John wanted to have it, or if he should put it aside and hide it somewhere under his bed until he would maybe be ready for it at a later point in time.

Brian took in a deep breath before he finally asked the question he had been having on his mind the entire time. ‘But, eh… do you still want it?’

‘Whether I still want it? Of course I do,’ John said as he huffed out a laugh, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘It’s the most precious gift anyone’s ever given me,’ he said with the most sincere smile Brian had ever seen, which made the giver of the present blush slightly.

To hide the colour on his face, Brian turned around to pick up the bass guitar, which he held in hands a bit awkwardly. ‘Well, I brought it with me, so if you want to… You know, hold it or so-‘

‘I’m seriously dying to,’ John’s smile only grew wider as he reached out to take the guitar into his possession, holding it as if he had just acquired the Olympic Torch of Fire.

‘It’s a bit wet, though,’ Brian said as he used the sleeve of his shirt to wipe the drops of rainwater off of the wooden casing of the instrument. ‘And there might be some sand on the underside.’

‘No problem. It can handle that. It’s a good bass, I can see that right away,’ John said, wiping off the wet sand and taking a good look at his newly acquired bass guitar. ‘Fender. That’s the same brand I used to play at home.’

‘Really?’ Brian asked.

‘Yes, really. God, it’s precious. Do you mind if I…?’ John softly strung some chords.

‘No, by all means, go ahead. That’s what I got it for, after all,’ Brian said. This was all he needed to say for John to start off; after a bit of fumbling around to check the tightness of the strings and to get used to the overall feeling of his new instrument, he got right to playing. Again, he started off with some basic tunes, but soon shifted to more complicated rhythms and actual basslines from songs Brian recognised. John started off making a comment of some sort on everything he introduced, but after not too long they fell into a comfortable silence. Brian even noticed that they had shifted closer to each other again, and he did not remember having draped his arm around John’s shoulder again, nor did he recall the moment John had placed the side of his head on his shoulder. It was only when John stopped strumming and looked up at him that Brian started missing what they apparently had had.

‘Brian?’

‘Yes?’ he replied dreamily, but his head was soon pulled out of the clouds when his crush’s voice was soft yet serious.

‘I need to tell you something.’

His arm was still around John’s shoulder, but it slipped away slightly when John revealed this somewhat threatening sounding statement. Brian did not know why it came around as such a threat to him, but there was something about it that had a very strange vibe - one he could not immediately place, and one he therefore did not feel comfortable with right from the start. Nevertheless, Brian assumed it would be impossible to tell John to hush and just remain in silence for the upcoming three days, so he told him to speak his mind.

‘What do you need to tell me?’ Brian asked as calmly as he could.

‘That the fact that it’s been so long ago is not the only reason I ran out.’

‘What’s more, then?’ Brian asked, finding himself curious to know what John was talking about.

‘It… everything got a bit overwhelming at that exact moment. The guilt, I mean,’ John said, fumbling with the hem of his wet shirt.

Brian frowned. ‘Which guilt?’ he asked, by now having absolutely no idea into which direction this conversation was turning.

‘The guilt of taking a present from you when I…’ John stopped halfway through when he seemed to be unsure how to finish his sentence. ‘You, eh… do you remember somewhere last week or the week before that, right? When you were angry at Freddie and Roger for having read your diary?’

‘I do, yes,’ Brian replied to the seemingly unrelated event he until that day preferred not to think of. Freddie and Roger having read his confessions towards John was painful enough as it was; what he did not know until that very moment was that things could get a whole lot worse, apparently.

‘It was not their fault they stumbled upon it,’ John said. Then, when Brian gave him a questioning look, he added softly: ‘I probably left it somewhere in the open.’

_It was not their fault_

_I probably left it somewhere in the open_

Brian found his mind being rather uncooperative that day; he tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but he found himself momentarily at a loss for logical reasoning. _It was not Freddie and Roger’s fault that they had read his diary, because John had left it somewhere in the open. John had left his diary out in the open. John had read his diary._

‘You left it- my diary? You read my diary?’ Brian asked shakily. All of the sudden, Freddie and Roger having read his attempts at putting his feelings towards John to paper did not seem so grave anymore; he had just been introduced to a much bigger problem.

‘Please, before you get angry and storm off,’ John continued hastily, as if Brian was capable of feeling any other emotion besides complete bedazzlement. ‘You left it on the side of your bed, and when I stood up and walked past it, it fell off. I went over to pick it up and wanted to put it back without looking, but then I saw my name and I… couldn’t help myself, I’m afraid.’ John spoke quickly and insecurely, and he did not dare to face his friend while Brian looked at him with an emotion that, as his words started to ring through, changed from puzzlement to something closer to defenceless panic. Brian wished he could say something, anything at all; but he found himself just about as stuck as John seemed to have been at the exact moment when he had been presented with his bass guitar. This was an event that suddenly seemed very long ago; to Brian, at any rate, it seemed that the world had stopped turning the second his crush had admitted having read his diary - that _specific_ part of his diary, more precisely. It was his turn to be quiet and frozen to the core now, while John was left to look at him and wonder what to do to make things better.

‘Brian? Brian… please, say something. Just say you’re angry, okay? Just say you hate me for having read your diary, or… anything, okay?’ John said quietly when his companion remained silent for an amount of time that even seemed to make him uncomfortable, which Brian dimly realised truly must be saying something.

‘So you read everything, then? That entire… _love letter_ I wrote to you?’ Brian eventually managed, hardly getting the specific words over his lips.

‘Not entirely,’ John was quick to react, probably all too happy Brian was still responding to him. ‘When I realised what it was, I stopped reading. I didn’t want to breach your privacy,’ John said, which was both a relief and a confirmation of the seriousness of the situation to Brian. ‘Besides… I couldn’t read on if I wanted to. I needed a moment on my own after having read that you… _like_ me.’

The emphasis on the penultimate word, which expressed complete disbelief, was the last thing Brian needed to hear to really have his complete nightmare come true. _This was it then_ , he thought to himself. This would be the last time he could just sit here with John, sit anywhere with John for that matter, and enjoy his time with him. This was the moment the truth was bound the come out, and the moment after which everything would change. Because how on earth could John not want to take his distance from him after he would have to confess to this news? How could he deny being in love with him when the evidence had literally been available for all his roommates to read?

‘Brian?’ Somewhere at what seemed to be the other side of the garden Brian heard his name being called out, but the voice of it was unmistakably John’s. A hand on his shoulder tried to shake him out of his state of dazedness, but Brian was so far away that it hardly made him realise he was still alive, for that matter.

‘Brian, please, say something to me,’ John said, his voice sounding surprisingly destitute again.

‘What do you want me to say?’ Brian asked. ‘What is there left for me to say apart from that I’m fucking _stupid_ and that I can’t believe I left my diary out there?’

‘Don’t say that,’ John whispered, but this only seemed to make matters worse for Brian, who by now had pulled his arm back from its previous position around John’s shoulder. He was too embarrassed to even look at John, let alone to touch him as he had done before.

‘I’m so stupid, and I can’t even- please, let’s just forget it, okay?’ Brian suddenly cut himself off in an attempt to wend off both more discussion and to prevent more tears from filling his eyes. ‘Let’s… I don’t know, let’s pretend it never happened and just carry on as usual,’ he proposed, even though he knew deep inside that this would be impossible for the both of them. Still, when John rejected this idea, he could not help feeling tears welling up.

‘I can’t,’ John told him with a shake of his head, which was enough to crumble Brian’s last remaining hope for a good ending for all of this.

‘Please,’ he felt himself saying, his voice clearly on the edge of breaking. ‘Please John, I couldn’t bear to lose you over this.’

‘Who says you’re losing me over this?’ John said, sounding completely calm and collected - quite the opposite from Brian at any rate, who by now felt as desperate as he’d ever been.

‘What else would you suggest? Do you think it’s going to make this friendship better now that you know I’m in love with you?’ Brian asked, tears of embarrassment, insecurity, and anger now spilling from his eyes. He was angry at everyone and everything in the world, but mostly at himself. If only he had kept his diary hidden away better, if he hadn’t carried out that Godforsaken diary assignment Sarah had given him in the first place-

‘I think it could make it better, for sure,’ John said. ‘What would you think I could possibly want to hear more than that you like me, too?’

Brian turned towards his companion; the hand he was about to bring up to wipe away the tears frozen in mid-air now that John had dropped yet something else for him to puzzle himself about.

‘What do you mean?’ Brian asked after a second of silence in which he could not figure it out.

‘Can’t you see it, Brian?’ John asked him, the slightest hint of an insecure smile on his lips. ‘That you’re the only person who keeps me around at this place? That my world was standing still before I met you, and that you’re the only reason I get up in the morning?’

‘I don’t know what you’re…’ Brian said helplessly.

‘I’m trying to tell you that I _love_ you, Brian,’ John then said more straight-forwardly than Brian ever could have imagined him to make such a confession. ‘God, I’ve never told anyone that I loved them before- I _have_ never loved anyone else before the way I love you, and I don’t know what I’m doing. But I love you. More than that, I’m in love with you. Have been since the day I met you.’

Brian was starstruck when he heard this. He felt like he was starting to hallucinate, that he was hoping so badly that something positive was going to be happening after this string of disasters that his mind was making up the current conversation itself. However, when he secretly pinched his own lower arm, he found out he was not dreaming - all John was saying was apparently real, which he at that exact moment found to be perhaps even more surreal.

‘You… you do?’ was all Brian stammered, looking at John with big, surprised eyes.

‘Why else do you think I’m spending all my time with you, and why I’m always trying to catch you alone? Why you’re the only one I’m willing to spend all my time with while I can hardly stand the presence of anyone else?’ John asked, at which Brian slowly started to smile again. ‘That I always want to sit next to you whenever we have therapy or during lunch, why I do nothing else but wait until you’re back when you’re out for a visit to Sarah or whoever? Couldn’t you see I’m doing all of this because I can’t go a second without you? Because I’m just completely head over heels for you?’

‘I don’t… know what to say,’ Brian said as he sniffed, an estranged sob escaping his throat while he giggled awkwardly, which he figured would not exactly make a pretty sound. Whether it did or not did not really seem to mind, though - John looked at him as if he was the precious thing he had ever seen in his entire life.

‘Then don’t say anything,’ John said in a the softest, most confidential voice. ‘You don’t need to say anything.’ Brian found himself drawn to John’s eyes; he hardly dared to look into them now that he knew for a fact that his own ones must be slightly red and swollen from the tears, and yet he could not look away from him either. It was as if their gazes had melted together, and Brian had never been so captivated by anyone else in his life before.

In fact, Brian was so mesmerised by the mere look of John’s soft, grey eyes that he could hardly even blink when his crush brought up his hand to his face. He felt a shiver run through his spine when John’s cold, wet fingers touched his cheek, and his heart rate went up by what felt like at least fifty percent when he discovered the reason he did this was to wipe away the remainder of his tears.

‘If you won’t say anything either,’ Brian whispered back at him; while moving over to remove his tears with his fingers, John had gotten close enough to him to make it unnecessary to speak any louder than at the lowest volume he could possibly produce. And speaking of John’s fingers - although they had travelled downwards, they still had not left Brian’s face. In fact, Brian found that they had moved down to stroke the skin of his cheek, slowly moving up and down until he eventually, after having repeated this moment a number of times, he withdrew his hand carefully. For a moment Brian was disappointed, but he soon found that there was no reason to be when John’s fingers instead rested at the line of the left side of his cheek to cup it gently.

Their eyes remained locked with each other, and before he knew it, it were not just their eyes that had locked; it happened too soon for Brian to point out who exactly had initiated and who had accepted the movement, but the next time he blinked, the hand on his jaw had wandered towards the back of his head, and John’s lips had been planted against his own.

If Brian had thought before that John’s eyes and his touch were captivating, then now he could add his lips to the list of things that left him speechless as well. As the fingers of John’s right hand tangled themselves into his wet curls, his lips were pressed against Brian’s a bit firmer now that they both realised that they both wanted it more than anything in the world. Brian was too overwhelmed still to move, but luckily John was mentally present enough to exchange his crouching position for leaning over and getting down with his knees into the muddy sand. As soon as he did so, he seemed to realise that it was now possible for him to hold on to the person he had wanted to kiss for God knew how long, and he threw his hands - including the bass guitar he still held in them - around Brian’s neck to close the space between them as much as he possibly could.

Although Brian had never kissed anyone before - never with this amount of love and passion at any rate, that was - it was as if his instinct somehow knew what to do. His hands moved to place themselves lightly around John’s waist on their own account, his eyes remained close and his lips moved against John’s softly yet passionately, as if this would be both the first and the last time he would ever get the chance. He had a feeling, however, that now they had both spoken their minds on how they felt towards each other, this was going to be a regular thing; the feeling John’s lips on his was too good to ever give up, and Brian was sure that in that moment, an atom bomb could not have separated them from each other.

It seemed to be, however, that there existed a force stronger than an atom bomb; a force called two intruding roommates walking in on you and cooing over the position they found you in.

‘Well well, would you look at that!’

Brian’s eyes snapped open and he pulled away from John as much as he could; that was both physically, giving that John’s arms were still around him, and mentally, in that he really, really did not want to be further apart from his crush than absolutely necessary to see who had interrupted them, even though he had a feeling he already knew.

‘That was something we did not expect from two prudes like you guys, I’ll have to admit,’ Freddie laughed standing in the opening of the cave of which Brian now wished they had closed the door of. ‘ _Especially_ not after what happened earlier today.’

‘It was about time, though,’ Roger piped up, wriggling in between the small space that Freddie had reserved for him to also get a view of the situation. Any other time Brian would have been sure that he would have turned beet red. But this time, however, he did not feel ashamed at all; not when John and he exchanged a glance that confirmed that Roger was right, but that they would not let themselves be bothered by what anyone thought of what they were supposed to do and when they should do so.

‘I think the time was just right,’ John answered, more to the person he was still holding on to than to anyone else around. To the pair of them, it did not feel like anyone else in the world existed anyway in that exact moment. There was some talking going on between Freddie and Roger, but they were so sunken in their own thoughts, their own moment together, that they didn’t hear any of it until Freddie eventually raised his voice for one question he seemed especially desperate to get answered.

‘So I take it the gift has been accepted?’ Freddie asked with a nod towards the bass guitar which John held, be it somewhat awkwardly, in the hands he had thrown around Brian. The pair of them smiled at each other - it seemed like the most rhetorical question in the world, but still it felt good to be able to answer it in the affirmative.

‘Absolutely,’ John whispered, after which he closed the space between Brian and him by pressing their lips together again. 


	12. Part Twelve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hi dear people! It’s certainly been a while, and I apologise for this, but here finally is the long awaited 12th chapter of the Clinic!!! John and Brian have finally stopped being useless around each other (well, a little, anyway), but in this chapter John raises Brian’s worries about him concerning his visiting hour. I also promised that some angst concerning Freddie and his eating disorder would follow, and here it is! I hope you guys will enjoy reading this chapter as I enjoyed writing it. Thanks to the dear @vampireluph for proofreading!

**The Clinic: Part Twelve**

‘I have no idea what to wear!’

Brian looked up at his roommate to find Freddie slamming the wardrobe door close rather dramatically. Whenever Brian thought he was nervous about the upcoming event, all he had to do was look at Freddie to feel like he was perfectly in control of himself and his emotions. Since the minute they had gotten up that morning, Freddie had been running around the place to brush his hair, perfect his makeup, and change his clothes every fifteen minutes. He strutted around the room and asked nervous questions about his appearance as if Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II herself was going to be paying a visit to the clinic, while in fact, it was going to be nothing more than a family visiting hour. Or well, nothing more than… Of course it was a grand thing to receive visitors, especially since they were only allowed to have people over once every month. Still, it surprised Brian how Freddie, who, in his year-long stay at Queen Mary’s had been seeing his family a fair amount of time, could be more nervous and panicky than Brian was himself now that he was finally going to see his parents for the first time in two months.

‘It’s not as if there’s so much else to wear than a grey Henley shirt, now is there?’ Brian asked from the bed he was sitting on, looking on as Freddie stopped before the mirror to apply a new layer of mascara. He did not see why Freddie was having such a fuss over his clothes when the only thing one was allowed to wear here was one of the three styles of grey uniform shirts and dark trousers; belts, jackets, scarves, jewellery, and accessories of any other kind had all been banned in the name of suicide prevention, meaning that there really was little option to express oneself through fashion. Still, Freddie had managed to change his pants from velvet flare trousers to dark jeans that made his legs look like twigs at least ten times, and it seemed like he was contemplating to opt for another pair of trousers once _again_.

‘Well, you could always go for a polo shirt instead of one with buttons,’ Roger, who was rolling down the sleeves of his shirt to prevent his family from seeing the black and blue insides of his elbows that would betray his ongoing heroin addiction, suggested. ‘Though I have to admit I rather like the buttons, for the fact that they allow me to do _this_ ,’ Roger said, creeping up behind his partner and tearing the three buttons of the henley shirt open all at once, which surprised his boyfriend enough to make him shriek and lose control over the mascara brush he had been holding up to his eyelashes, and which had now left a smear just below his eyebrow.

‘Roger! You’re smudging my mascara,’ Freddie cried out, instantly in a hurry to turn to his makeup bag and fish out a cotton swab to fix the damage.

‘Which one of the fifteen layers?’ Roger asked, and Brian could not help but chuckle at this. They all knew Freddie liked his makeup and wore it regularly, but he tended to overdo it on days like these.

‘All of them,’ Freddie grumbled, wetting the cotton stab with tap water and leaning closer to the mirror to wipe away all excess mascara on his skin.

‘I’m betting you ten bucks that his teenage sister will come in wearing less makeup than he does,’ Roger said as he diverted his attention to Brian, who smiled weakly at him, unsure what to say of it.

‘You’d better keep your ten bucks, darling,’ Freddie let Brian know. ‘Kashmira is a dear, but she’s not girly or feminine at all. I own more shoes, bags, and make up than she does.’

‘You own more shoes, bags, and make up than _anyone_ in the country,’ Roger said, to which Freddie turned around briefly to stick out his tongue before he got back to adding yet another application of mascara to his eyelashes. While Freddie further worked on his makeup, Roger tried out how high his could roll up his sleeves without accidentally exposing his heroin addiction to his family, and John remained in bed, Brian was left to sit on his bed and awkwardly turn around the pen he had picked up to give himself something to fiddle with. He had tried to pretend that he was not nervous, but now that the clock was nearing the two hour mark, he could no longer deceive himself. He was tense and nervous to see his parents again; it had been two months after all, two long months during which he had only been allowed to call them and exchange letters with them since very recently, following the instructions from his old psychiatrist. There was so much to tell them, and at the same time he was afraid he would be unable to utter a word once he would be left to actually face them. Never before had he been away from his home and family for such a long time; how should he now go around to pick up the pieces again? Should he carry on as if nothing had ever changed, or would he break down at the sight of his parents? Would they be just as nervous about seeing him as he was about seeing them? Would they have been lying awake half of the night looking up at the visiting hour, too, just like he had done? Or would they remain calm and quiet underneath all of it? He could not decide which one of these he would find easier to deal with; to see his parents be emotional and confirm that they missed and loved him, or have them be calm and collected and thereby hopefully help him keep himself together as well. But wouldn’t he be disappointed if his parents wouldn’t be at least a bit emotional - if not at least his mother would shed a tear at the sight of him, just for the fact that she could not-

‘Are you nervous, Brian? You seem a little pale.’

Brian was awakened from his reverie by a soft voice which he knew for a fact belonged to John. He looked up from the pen he was spinning around in his fingers to look into the soft grey eyes of John’s, who had apparently turned around from the wall to look at him instead. It was not only Brian whose attention he attracted; Freddie looked up as well, and peered over to make a judgement on Brian’s situation himself.

‘Nothing that some foundation cannot solve,’ Freddie concluded after having taken a quick glance at Brian’s face. John, however, was more interested on tackling the underlying reasons instead of the symptoms, and looked at Brian to encourage him to talk to him.

‘A little, I think. I haven’t seen my parents for so long,’ Brian admitted to John, and he could hear how choked up his own voice sounded towards the end of the sentence. He had to divert his attention back to his pen again to make sure his eyes would not start watering, but it seemed that John sensed that when he turned away, he needed support now more than ever.

‘Hey, it’ll be alright,’ John whispered, and he reached out a hand towards Brian to hold on to. Brian did not doubt for a second; leaving the pen on the mattress next to him, Brian shifted a bit closer to the edge of the bed to be able to reach out and grasp John’s hand. John closed his hand over Brian’s fingers, and smiled softly at Brian while he stroke his fingers with his thumb. Brian instantly felt himself growing warm from the inside, his heart starting to beat a bit faster - not out of nervousness as it had done before, but this time out of happiness. He did not know how John did it, but whenever Brian locked eyes with him, held hands with him, hugged him, kissed him, or was close to him in any other way, he could feel his heart rate going up out of pure excitement to be with him, while at the same time, he felt this sense of amazing tranquillity and peacefulness washing over him. John just seemed to have that effect on him, to make him feel like his heart pounded out of his chest while simultaneously make him feel more at peace than Brian ever could have imagined feeling. He just felt so at place with John, and between every morning he woke up with him and every evening he kissed him goodnight, he felt his love for him growing stronger. He was head over heels for John, and he never would have let go of his hand if it would not have been for Freddie to rush in in between them with his makeup bag to try and see what he could do to fix Brian’s pale complexion.

‘A bit of foundation and powder will work wonders,’ Freddie said as he got down next to Brian, who shared a glance with John without saying anything yet. ‘Do you by any chance know your colour?’

‘I believe he likes purple, it brings out his eyes,’ John said dryly, which earned him a giggle from Brian and an eye roll from their intruder.

‘I meant his _skin_ colour, smartass,’ Freddie said while rummaging through the contents of his makeup bag. ‘I think I’ll have to mix something, my foundation’s a bit too dark for you,’ he pondered out loud when he held up a nude-coloured flask to Brian’s cheek.

‘How long will that take?’ Brian asked, sending a nervous glance over to the clock. The visiting hour started at two, but they had been summoned to arrive ten minutes early. Right now it was a quarter to two, and he highly doubted if Freddie, who had been busy caking his face in all sorts of creams and powders for the largest part of the morning, would manage to get his done in under five minutes.

Freddie, who followed his glance, clamped a hand in front of his mouth when he saw what time it was. ‘A quarter to two already? Oh darling, I’m sorry, that won’t do in such a short amount of time!’ He sounded seriously sorry and distressed about not being able to fulfil the promise he had dictated to Brian, while his client - victim, more like - was relieved to say the least that he did not have to undergo all of his roommate’s beauty rituals and show up with a face caked in makeup to his parents. Luckily (or unluckily, for that matter), Freddie found a way to make it up to him.

‘Let me then at least do your hair!’ Freddie offered as he stood up from the bed and walked over to his drawer to fetch a hairbrush and a bottle of hairspray.

‘Combing curly hair usually only makes it look-’ Brian tried to warn him, but before he was given the time to finish his sentence, the teeth of the hairbrush had already dug into his pile of curls, and he was left to mutter the remaining ‘worse’ under his breath. Freddie was having none of this, however; and after a few minutes of fluffing up his hair and spraying enough hairspray from the bottle to single-handedly create a new gap in the ozone layer, he released Brian from the bed with soft, shiny curls that looked unmistakably better than they had done in quite a while. John, in the meantime, simply looked at the commotion between Brian and Freddie with a slightly amused look on his face. Brian thanked Freddie for the effort while standing in front of the mirror to appreciate the outcome, but he was not given more than just about ten seconds to see the work before Roger reminded them they had to leave.

‘It’s almost ten to. Are you coming too, Brian?’ Roger, who was already standing in front of the door holding out his arm for Freddie to hook his into, asked his roommate. Brian nodded and turned to John, who to this very moment had made no visible attempts to get himself ready for the visiting hour or to even stand up. Brian had not expected him to put major effort into his appearance, but he would have expected John to be a bit more alive and upbeat about this rare opportunity to be reconnected with people from the other side of the fences of Queen Mary’s.

‘John, are you getting out of bed? We have to leave now if we want to be on time,’ he asked John, who tiredly opened one eye. It made Brian wonder if the boy had not simply be left there to sleep right through visiting hour if he had not called out to him.

‘Yes, coming,’ John said as he stood up and lazily stretched his arms. He ran a hand through his hair and joined the rest of the group, and though Brian did not want to push him, he could not help asking if he should not put a little more effort into his appearance that day - such as putting on a clean shirt, washing his face, or running a comb through his hair.

‘Do you want to borrow my brush, or maybe a shirt…?’ Brian tried, but his attempt was shrugged off by John, who did not seem to see the added value of going through any of this effort.

‘Everybody already knows that I live like this anyway,’ John said with a bit of a smile, and Brian decided to let it rest. Roger opened the door of their room, and the four of them made it downstairs to the hallway. Here they had been told to gather, but even though Brian was sure that they were a few minutes late from the assigned time of ten to two, there were no more than perhaps a dozen of patients and a few mentors, of which Brian was disappointed to find that Nolan was not a part of.

‘Where is everybody?’ he asked Freddie quietly. He had expected a big hoard of people to gather around and push themselves to the front row to be able to temporarily reunite with their family and friends as soon as possible. Right now, however, there were too little people to even _talk_ of a front row.

‘Oh, people are usually late to try and escape being patted down. And besides that, only about twenty-five people can go at once,’ he said casually.

‘Only twenty-five?’ Brian asked.

‘The visiting room isn’t very big. This used to be a prison after all, and the more people you allow to talk have visitors over at the same time, the harder it becomes to supervise them all,’ Freddie explained. ‘That’s also why we can only have visitors once a month; twenty-five people an hour, two visiting hours each Saturday, and over two hundred fifty patients. Right now we have rooms forty until forty-five, and after us rooms forty-six until fifty-one, I believe.’

‘Why don’t they just do more visiting hours, then?’ Brian asked.

‘Because that’s time and effort and security, dear, and that’s all they don’t have at this place.’

Some more people entered the hallway, both patients and security, and at exactly two o’clock one of the mentors clapped their hands to start off the session.

‘Can I have your attention, please?’ the guy - a broad man of about fifty years of age and whom Brian was pretty sure he had never seen before - shouted, and it only took about half a minute to have everybody go silent. ‘Your visitors have all gathered in the visiting room that we’ll go to in a moment. Once we arrive, everyone will line up, be searched for forbidden items, and be signed off on the list. You’ll then be allowed to enter the room and will be given one hour to conversate quietly, after which you will hear a bell that will mark the end of the visiting time. You’ll then say goodbye and walk out again within five minutes, be patted down again, sign out, and return to your daily schedule. Failure to follow these rules will lead to expulsion. Am I clear?’

A vague, uninterest murmur arose that sounded like a ‘yes, after which the group started moving into the direction of the stairs. A door Brian had never paid any particular attention to was opened, and they walked through a dimly-lit, narrow corridor where John and he could barely walk next to each other. It made him feel a bit claustrophobic, and, judging no one would be able to see so anyway in the semi-darkness, he clutched onto John’s hand with all of his might.

‘Still nervous?’ John asked him softly as they marched through the corridor at a steady rate, and Brian nodded silently. ‘It’s gonna be okay, Brian. As soon as you’ll see your parents, you’ll feel on top of the world again, I’m sure of it.’ These words of his crush made Brian feel a bit better; he kept them in mind while everybody was lined up and individually patted down by security guards. Someone was removed from the line for being in the possession of a small box of undefinable pills which were expected to be drugs of some sort, and Brian squeezed John’s hand when two wardens had to drag said person away with a force that neared violence. The peace - or at least the quietness - returned soon when the door was opened to let people in one by one.

The row slinked quickly in front of them, and with only Freddie and Roger in front of him, Brian first allowed himself to peek inside the visiting room. It was indeed, as Freddie had told him before, not too big of a room; square tables had been arranged around the place with two chairs at either side of the table so people could sit down and talk to family and friends without the interference of others. The walls were dark grey and Brian could see the heavy iron bars in front of the windows; it was very clear that nothing ever had been altered about the room to make it look less like the prison visiting room that it once had been. It looked gloomy and sad as everything did in at Queen Mary’s, and Brian almost felt ashamed that this was where he would have to meet his parents.

‘Next!’

The voice of the guard signing off the names awoke Brian from his thoughts, and he stepped forwards, fingers still entangled with those of John.

‘Name?’ the man asked mechanically without looking up at him.

‘Brian May,’ Brian said so quietly that it surprised him the man could even hear it.

‘Brian May, Brian May…’ the guy frowned lightly while he trailed his pencil down the list, but eventually found his name. ‘Brian May, table sixteen. You may proceed.’

Brian gave a thankful nod to the guard, but as he turned around for John to tell the guard his name, he was surprised by the answer his friend gave him.

‘Don’t mind me, I’m just here for the emotional support,’ John said, after which he gestured for Brian to step back into the hallway. Confused, Brian did as he was told, squeezing past the new person who was next in line now that John had excluded himself from the queue. Before he was capable to open his mouth and ask John what he was doing, he was squeezed into a hug by his crush, who wrapped his arms tightly around him.

‘Good luck, Bri. I’ll be waiting in our room for you when you get back,’ John murmured against his shoulder, which - although Brian wished he could stay in full embrace with John for the remainder of the hour - made him pull away abruptly and stare at John as he tried to process these words.

‘What do you mean? Aren’t you going to- but what about your visitors?’ he asked, turning around to look into the room and see if he could spot anyone who would look like his roommate and could therefore be family. He didn’t spot anyone right away, and his attention was soon returned to look at John when he said something that broke his heart.

‘I don’t have any visitors,’ John told him plainly.

‘You don’t… Why don’t you have any visitors?’ Brian asked him. He had secretly been eager to see who John would meet up with, and see how he would interact with family or friends or whoever it was he would have invited for today’s visiting hour. To hear that there was no one coming over for him was a disappointment for Brian, but much more importantly, it broke his heart to think that the rest of them would now run off to catch up with their loved ones while John would be forced to go back to their room and probably spend the time in bed, gloomily thinking of the people he missed.

John shrugged, however, as if it didn’t matter all too much to him. ‘Privileges, you know. I skipped some appointments with my psychiatrists, didn’t do my homework… You know how things go.’

Brian nodded dazedly, even though he could not believe that staff would actually be so cruel as to take away John’s only moment of contact with the outer world. First they didn’t let him write or receive any letters, and now this?

‘But then- why didn’t you tell me?’ Brian asked him quietly. He was still utterly confused, even though things started to fall into place by now - John’s reticence towards talking of the visiting hour, his lack of preparation like Freddie, Roger, and he had done that morning, not getting out of bed before Brian had called him over… But never admitting that he was going to miss out on this moment Brian had looked forward to for weeks until the very moment Brian had been about to step over the threshold of the visiting room really put the puzzle together. 

‘Because I knew you’d feel bad for me and worry, and I didn’t want to spoil your first visit from your parents,’ John said with the smallest smile, which broke Brian’s heart even more, if still possible.

‘John…’ Brian said helplessly. He knew John to be a selfless person, but to actually avoid letting your best friend know you’d be the only person not to receive any visitors during the one hour a month one was allowed to because you were afraid it would spoil the excitement of looking forward to seeing his parents again, was taking selflessness to a whole new level. A level Brian wished John would not have pushed himself towards, and certainly not for his sake.

‘Mister May, are you still coming?’ the guard at the door to the visiting room asked. Brian looked up to see that the remainder of the queue had disappeared from the hallway, and that John and he now were the only ones still standing there taking up the time of the staff member.

‘He’ll be right over,’ John answered the guard on Brian’s behalf, before he threw his arms around Brian for one last hug and a few words of consolation. ‘Don’t worry about me. I don’t mind it. Go enjoy your visit, and tell me all about it when you get back.’ John pulled away from Brian’s frozen body, and gave him one more wave and a smile, before he turned around and walked into the direction they had come from. Brian was left to stare at him when he disappeared into the distance.

‘Now or never, May,’ the guard warned him impatiently. Brian found himself in doubt; he had waited for this visit of his parents for weeks, but he felt like he would never forgive himself if he would not go after John at this exact moment. John had sounded rather firm when he had told him he did not mind not having anyone over, but Brian could not help but not believe him. John might have a depression and an antisocial personality disorder, but this did not seem to mean to Brian that he therefore automatically was not touched by the fact that he was the only one of the group not to have anyone to be waiting for him in the visiting hall, not to have someone jump up at the sight of him and hug him and tell him they missed him. If John had nobody to do this for him, Brian knew that he was the one to bring him the warmth and comfort that he was missing out on right now by having been excluded from visiting time.

With the eyes of the guard still on him - burning right through him in irritation, more like - Brian pondered what to do. He placed a step into the direction into which his crush had just disappeared, but deep inside, he knew that John would not want for him to miss out on this only option to see his parents for the first time since his admission. The entire reason why John had been quiet about his own misfortunate situation was so that Brian could enjoy his time with his parents without any guilt or scruples, and if he would now throw away all the effort John had put into keeping up his spirits by missing out on the visit, he was sure John would be disappointed. John wanted him to go see his parents and have fun; and what else could Brian do than that which both he and John desired?

Turning around into the direction of the visiting hall again, Brian took in a deep breath and tried not to let his head hang too low while he stepped over the threshold. When the heavy iron door of the visiting room closed behind him, he felt just as lost as he had done when the door that separated the entrance hall of Queen Mary’s from the actual mental clinic had closed on him upon his admission. That time, the closing door had divided him from his parents, while this time, it was reuniting him with them. Then why did he still feel so lost, knowing that he would finally see the people he had missed so much, while the person he had left behind for now, he would see again in an hour? Why did John not having visitors seem to overshadow the enjoyment of being reunited with his parents, even when when John had told him he was at peace with the situation and wanted Brian to enjoy himself?

‘Brian!’

It was only when a familiar voice called out his name that Brian realised he had randomly been wandering into the room without actively searching for his family. He had even forgotten the number of the table they had been assigned to, but he did not seem to need this anyway; his parents had gotten up from their seats and his mother was waving at him rather frantically with her handkerchief. It would have embarrassed him any other moment, if he had not been so benumbed by John’s sudden departure and his own conscience still torn on the question whether he had done right by leaving John to retreat to his bedroom while he stayed here to have his parents over.

This question continued to plague his mind, but it was soon replaced when entirely new matters were starting to demand his attention - such as his mother making her way towards him and his father following her close behind when he noticed where they were sitting and carefully walked towards them. Upon the sight of his parents, Brian suddenly felt dizzy; he had waited so long for this moment that it seemed surreal to finally actually see them again. It was all so overwhelming that he felt as if he was going to lose his balance and fall if he did not get to hold onto something soon. However, the second he had grasped the table top of another unit of patient and loved ones, his parents had arrived at the place where he was standing, and his mother threw her arms around him in the tightest way possible, making it impossible for Brian to stagger any longer. His father followed the example of his wife, and soon, Brian found himself in the midst of a tangle of arms, tears, and handkerchiefs.

‘Brian, we’ve missed you _so_!’ his mother sobbed against his shoulder; Brian could already feel the light grey fabric of his shirt stain, but this was the last of his concerns right now. All that mattered was that his parents were here and that they seemed to have missed them, that they loved him, and that he could finally see them again.

‘I’ve missed you too, mum,’ Brian whispered back at her, tightening his grip around her back. He felt tears welling up in his eyes, but for some reason, he did not shed them; not yet, at any rate. He felt numb with happiness and relief to have his parents right here with him, and still, the sense of guilt regarding John’s current situation did not allow him to fully commit to the moment the way he had thought he would do if he would see his parents. He felt a bit uncomfortable holding on so tight to them while John would now probably in bed, having no one to cling to or to even talk to, and he was almost relieved when a warden came over to the three of them to tell them to settle down.

‘Sir, madam, I’m going to have to ask you to sit down at your table and continue the meeting there,’ the man said sternly but not unkindly.

‘Let us have one second,’ Brian heard his father say, and he felt his arm tightening around his back.

‘You’ll have to let go now. Physical contact is not allowed, nor is standing in the middle of the room. Return to your seats, please, or I’ll have to bring in someone more senior.’

At last Brian was let go of by his parents, who now quietly followed him as he walked them over to their assigned place. Trying hard not to show his relief, Brian sat down on one side of the table, while his visitors sat down opposite of him.

‘My Lord, are they always this strict at this place?’ his mother whispered, and Brian shook his head.

‘No, they’re usually alright. We don’t get to see too much of the guards anyway,’ Brian said in an attempt to comfort his mother. It was not even a lie; they really did not see the guards a lot. Of course, there were always a few guarding the exits and entrances, and a handful of them would guard the canteen and other community rooms during activities lots of people were involved in. That this lack of security staff was not so much a good thing but rather a security issue because it meant that half of the wardens were overworked and that there were never enough people around to successfully ward off drugs and knives and all other dangerous items, was something Brian decided to keep to himself. He did not want his parents, and especially his mother, to stress out even more than they probably already were.

‘I’m glad to hear. I couldn’t _bear_ the thought of my son being treated like this on a daily basis!’ Ruth said, bringing the handkerchief up to her eyes one more time.

‘Did they also search you before this visit, son?’ his father asked, suddenly seeming to have been inspired by his wife’s talk of security. ‘We had to be here half an hour prior and they patted all of us down. I even had to take off my shoes and my tie,’ he said with a tone of disbelief in his voice.

‘My, my!’ his wife agreed. ‘They turned my entire handbag upside down. It was a miracle they didn’t feel inside my panties!’

Brian, hoping no one had heard this last rather shameful comment of his mother’s, said: ‘Uhm, yes, they tend to do a lot of searching here. They don’t want drugs or weapons coming in.’

‘It’s probably a good thing, then. We must all sacrifice some of our privacy to create a safe environment, even if that means they want to search our knickers, don’t we?’ Ruth said, and Brian nodded, even though he had a feeling his mother had no idea how much he was giving up on a daily base for the ‘safe environment’ of Queen Mary’s.

‘But enough about us for now. How are you doing, Brian? Have you gotten used to life at Queen Mary’s?’ his father asked, also seemingly desperate to get away from his wife’s embarrassing comments about the possibility of security staff searching her underwear.

Brian gladly seized the opportunity to change the topic. ‘I mean, yes, I think I’ve gotten used to this place. It seemed unbearable at first, but I guess you get used to it when you have no other choice,’ he said. It was an ill-hidden attempt at making his parents feel just a tad guilty about having dropped him off at a mental institution, and it seemed to work. His parents exchanged a bit of a painful glance between the two of them, before his father eventually replied.

‘You know we did this for your own good, Brian. It’s much better for you to be here, between your own people and professionals, than to sit at home with a bunch of old socks like ourselves,’ Harold said with something of a smile, but it looked painfully forced to Brian.

‘These people here should be able to give you a lot more support than we could ever do,’ his wife helped him, before she looked around. ‘I mean, look at all these boys around here. I’m sure you must have managed to mingle yourself into their society?’

‘That’s… not really how it works here,’ Brian admitted in something of a mumble. ‘It’s not as if everyone here knows each other and talks to each other.’

‘No? But you spend night and day with these people, don’t you? You must know most of them,’ his mother insisted.

‘Well… Most of these people here I know because they live in the room next to us. But apart from that I’m not in touch with too many people,’ Brian shrugged, finding himself not being in the mood to keep up appearances today.

‘Brian…’ his mother sounded as if she disapproved. ‘You’re not shutting yourself off again, are you?’

‘Of course not, mum,’ Brian reassured her; he knew that one of his parents’ biggest fears was that he would sink down into his depression so deeply again that he would refuse to come out of bed and talk to anyone, as he had done before. ‘But there’s not really any need to go out and talk to many people. I found some very good friends in my roommates.’

‘Your roommates!’ his mother repeated, sounding enthusiastic. ‘You did write something about them, and especially this one boy named John, I remember.’

Brian, in an attempt to ward off his blush at the mere mention of John’s name, rested his face on his hand. ‘Yes, there’s Freddie, Roger, and John.’

‘Yes, those were the names! Are they here right now?’ his mum asked, already turning around to see if she could spot them - as if she could possibly detect them without ever having seen them before.

‘Freddie and Roger should be, yes,’ Brian said, following his father’s glance until he spotted Roger in the line next to them a few units away. ‘That one over there is Roger.’ His parents turned around in their seat, and Brian pointed - in a way he hoped would not be too obvious - at the booth where his friend was sitting with two people he expected to be his parents and a girl who looked strikingly similar to him, whom Brian suspected must be the sister he had heard Roger speak of on a few occasions.

‘The boy with the long blond hair?’ his father asked, obviously trying to keep his voice neutral but still sounding a bit derogatory. Brian knew this was because of the long hair - he knew his father found long locks to be ‘feminine’ and ‘unmanly’, but Brian couldn’t care less about what his father thought of Roger’s appearance, and nor did his mother seem to mind her husband’s appearance.

‘He looks very sweet,’ she said before she turned back to Brian. ‘Does he also have borderline?’

‘Well, no one really has borderline, even not here,’ Brian said, fumbling with the hem of his sleeve.

His mother, realising her mistake, said: ‘Oh sorry, that was silly of me. What is he in for?’

‘Depression and hero- eh, substance abuse,’ Brian quickly corrected himself.  Of course he was aware of the fact that there was nothing his parents could do about it, but still he did not want them to think he was friends with a heroin addict. His father would probably be disappointed and his mother would worry herself sick over him, and that was something Brian, despite everything, did not want to do to them.

‘Substance abuse? Of what?’ his father asked, sounding rather alarmed despite Brian’s best efforts to make Roger’s addiction pass off as a minor inconvenience.

‘Uh, I’m not too sure, actually. He used to do drugs, but he’s clean now, of course,’ Brian said, deciding to leave out the various incidents of Roger having gotten his hands on pills or syringes of some sort. He glanced around the room to see if he could spy Freddie somewhere, which would allow him to move away from this topic towards one where he would not probably be lectured on the dangers of drugs he would never go near anyway. When he eventually spotted him, all the way in the corner towards his left, he called out in relief: ‘Look, and that’s Freddie, my other roommate.’

His parents turned around to lay their eyes on the person their son had just pointed their attention towards, which gave Brian the opportunity to suck in a breath of relief. This did not last very long, though; the moment Freddie stretched out his arms above his head and had the sleeves of the shirt fall down his twig-like arms, Brian knew his parents had found something new to worry about.

‘My God, does _he_ look fragile! Is he alright?’ his mother called out, her glance resting between the boy she had just laid eyes on and her own son.

‘Freddie is quite alright at the moment, yes. But he has anorexia,’ Brian disclosed.

‘And what does that entail?’ Harold asked.

‘It’s an eating disorder, dad.’

‘I thought only girls could get those,’ Harold frowned, which earned him an indignant glance and a light slap against his shoulder from his wife, who seemed ashamed of this stereotypical assumption.

‘Harold! Don’t be so ignorant.’

‘No, it’s not only girls who get eating disorders,’ Brian said. ‘Freddie’s therapy group for his anorexia must have at least ten people with similar problems.’

His father nodded to let his son know he understood and acknowledged that he had been wrong, but seemed to find it a bit painful, for he quickly moved to the last remaining roommate. ‘And this other fellow, then? This John you wrote about?’

‘Yes, John,’ Brian said a bit dreamily. ‘John is also a roommate, and my best friend here.’

‘Is he the one you hugged in the doorway?’ his mother asked.

‘Yes, that’s him,’ Brian said, unable to wash away the smile that started forming on his lips. Despite still feeling guilty about having left him behind, just the thought of hugging John - hugging him, holding his hand, and kissing him - never failed to make butterflies flutter around in Brian’s stomach. He was still falling deeper and deeper in love with John every day they spent together, but he was not ready to tell his parents yet. They had no idea he was gay, or bisexual, or whatever his attraction to John meant he was, and this one hour of catching up with them did not seem like the right moment to come out to his parents to Brian. He would rather address the topic in a letter, or during a later visit, when he would have had the opportunity to prepare himself for what he wanted to say and how he was going to bring it.

Besides, he did not want to share the ‘news’ with his parents, or anyone else for that matter, yet. What was happening between John and he was something that happened between the pair of them only, and something they at the moment did not let anyone in on. Of course, after their first kiss that Freddie and Roger had conveniently walked in on, they could not prevent their roommates from knowing that certain feelings were blooming between them, but still they preferred to be private about their relationship. They had already uttered the term ‘boyfriends’ to each other, but all of their hugs and kisses and other signs of affection they kept between themselves for now. They both were rather private people, and preferred to keep this latest development between the pair of them. It was nobody else’s business anyway.

‘Shouldn’t he also be somewhere here?’ his mother asked, not so subtly looking if she could spot the new best friend of her son.

‘No, he’s not. He doesn’t have any visitors today.’

‘Not one?’ his father asked, sounding just as surprised as Brian had been when John had first disclosed this news to him.

Deciding that he did not feel like diving into the entire privileges-story which would undoubtedly raise a thousand questions from his parents, Brian said: ‘He’s got his visiting round next week.’ This seemed to do the trick, luckily, and Brian found himself bulshitting his way through how the visiting hours were established and divided at Queen Mary’s. The damage to himself had already been done, though; he could not get John out of his thoughts again, and found himself having to jiggle between all his parents asked them - whether he was still taking the same medicines, if he showered regularly enough, if Nolan was still his mentor - and all the questions he wished he could ask. Where was John now? Would this instance break the faith the two of them had established between themselves, or was he seriously okay with Brian receiving his parents while he was left on his own? And what exactly had John done wrong to no longer be allowed to receive visitors? Admittedly, the reluctant, antisocial John was not exactly a model patient, but was skipping on a meeting with a psychiatrist every now and then really an offence bad enough to take away all his privileges concerning contact with the outer world? Brian did not even remember John missing out on more than two appointments in the last couple of weeks; since when were they keeping such a strict register of attendance?

When the bell rang to announce the end of the visiting hour, Brian was both disappointed and relieved. The hour really had flown past and he knew for a fact that he easily could have been in conversation with his parents for another hour, but the guilt and insecurity concerning John really was settling in now. Even more than being here with his parents, the main thing Brian wanted was to go back and talk to John - and perhaps have a word with Freddie or Roger first, because the longer he thought of it, the less he believed John’s explanation of his absence.

Brian stood up from the table and was quick to hug his parents, who seemed to be having a lot more trouble letting go of him than he was currently having with separating himself from them. Whereas he was positive he could have given them a quick kiss and walk into the direction of the door, his parents would not let him go that easily. His father hugged him uncomfortably long and told him over and over again to take good care of himself whilst his mum stood next to the two of them, sobbing into her handkerchief. Brian tried to gently pull himself away and tell his parents they would see each other in a month again and that they would continue to telephone and exchange letters. Still, in the end, three wardens had to gather around them before his mother eventually let go of him. With a few more tearful goodbyes from his parents’ side they were ushered into the direction of where they came from. Brian was quick to half-walk, half-run over to the door, at which Freddie and Roger were waiting for him. The rest of the room seemed long deserted.

‘Sorry guys, couldn’t quite shake myself loose yet,’ Brian mumbled, but neither of them minded.

‘Oh, we’ve all been there, the first visit of our parents after our admission,’ Freddie said as they went to sign out their name. ‘No one will hold it against you, darling,’ he said, even though Brian highly doubted this when the next group of twenty-five stood in the hallway looking rather irritated. Brian hardly dared to look at them; especially when he saw Drew, the guy who had beaten up Jimmy, stand in line with a sneering expression on his face as soon as he saw Brian.

Making sure to hop over the foot Drew ‘accidentally’ stretched out when they walked past him, Brian kept his eyes straight on the door they were walking towards. John’s story was starting to become less and less trustworthy with every passing second; Brian was positive Drew had just been released from isolation cell the day before for having kicked a security guard in the shins when they had discovered his attempt at drugs smuggling. How on earth could Drew physically assault someone and still be allowed to receive visitors, while John, who would never hurt anyone and never did anything worse than not showing up at an appointment, be punished severely for it?

‘You’re being quiet,’ Roger remarked as he opened the door that would grant them access to the main hallway of the clinic. ‘Did you have a good visit?’

‘Sure, yes, it was good,’ Brian said automatically. Knowing that it was going to be now or never, he asked his friends: ‘Did you know that John wasn’t going to be having any visitors over today?’

‘I did, yes. Didn’t you?’ Freddie asked.

Brian did his best to shrug unaffectedly. ‘No, I didn’t’.

‘He never does. Not as far as I can remember, at any rate,’ Freddie said.

‘Never?’ This rather surprised Brian. What on earth could John possibly have done to never be allowed to have anyone over?

‘No, never. Don’t you remember last month, when the two of you were in your room on your own when Roger and me had our visiting hour?’ Freddie reminded him.

‘Now that you’re mentioning it…’ Brian said, vaguely recollecting the memory of it. ‘But what has he done so wrong to not be allowed to receive anyone?’

‘I don’t think he’s done anything wrong,’ Freddie shrugged. ‘He’s just not really the social type of person, and doesn’t attach any value to these visiting moments.’

‘He told _me_ he doesn’t have the privileges because he missed out on some appointments,’ Brian said, awfully in doubt right now. One of his friends must be wrong in this situation; one of them must be telling him something that was untrue, be it unintentionally or on purpose.

‘Really?’ Roger sounded surprised. ‘Being denied visiting rights sounds like too tough a punishment for that to me.’

Brian, glad to know he was not the only one with this opinion, said: ‘I thought so, too. Especially when I saw Drew standing in line when he went back.’

‘Ugh, it’s about time they get him away from Queen Mary’s and right into prison,’ Freddie grimaced, and stopped for a second in the middle of the stairs they were ascending. ‘No, but what I heard from John is that he does have visiting rights, but chooses not to use them.’

 _This_ was even more of an unexplainable part of the puzzle to Brian. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘You have to keep in mind that he has an antisocial personality disorder, darling,’ Freddie clacked his tongue. ‘His impulses to appreciate relations with people work differently from ours, if at all. And on top of that, he also has a depression. Social interaction is said to be very demanding when you have a depression.’

‘I can testify that that’s true,’ Brian mumbled. ‘But still… It’s just an hour once a month. Is he really that distanced from family and friends, that he cannot even bring himself to spend one hour a month with them?’

‘I think you should ask _him_ , darling. But to be honest, I’ve found that he doesn’t really like talking about it all that much,’ Freddie said as they entered the hallway to which their dorm was attached. ‘But I’m sure he’ll enjoy getting to see you again after you’ve just been away for an hour. That’s the longest you two have ever spent apart from each other, I figure?’ Freddie laughed.

‘Shut it,’ Brian rolled his eyes as they halted in front of their room, producing a key from his pocket.

‘It’s no secret you two are in love, dear. We literally walked in on the pair of you kissing the life out of each other,’ Freddie reminded him. ‘Any chance you’ll tell us about it one of these days, or will the pair of you keep us in the dark about this until the rest of our days?’

Brian, knowing for a fact that he would blush even more than he already did at the moment if he was to reply to this in any way, pressed the key into the lock and pushed open the door.

‘John, we’re back again,’ he said softly while he tiptoed into their room, just in case their last remaining roommate had fallen asleep during their absence. He was afraid that all his effort to enter the dorm quietly was in declared to be in vain when Freddie and Roger followed him behind, however. Freddie closed the door behind him with enough force that Brian could see the glass of water on his nightstand tremble, and Roger just about ripped the covers off of John in an attempt to catch him by surprise.

‘And we brought your boyfriend!’ he said excitedly, and Brian could swear that John, who opened one tired eye to look at the people who had just intruded the quietness of his room, gave him the slightest hint of a smile upon hearing these words.

Brian, not too sure what to do with Roger’s comment, simply walked over to John’s bed and asked him if he could sit with him. He could hear either Freddie or Roger murmuring something about them getting into bed together, but decided to ignore this comment, too, and sat down next to John when he tapped on the mattress to invite him over. ‘Listen, John, I’m so sorry about leaving you behind-’

‘What do you mean, leaving me behind?’ John asked. ‘You can’t help that I don’t have visiting rights.’

Brian considered for a moment; this might be the moment to ask the truth, whether he really was not allowed to have anyone over like he had told Brian, or if he chose not to use his visiting rights for some reason like Freddie had told him. However, John looked away from him as if he knew what was on Brian’s mind and wanted to avoid being asked to clarify his situation, and Brian could not bring himself to pose the question. Maybe it was not the right moment and time, after all - now that Freddie and Roger were running around the room, talking of going out to practice with the four of them.

‘How was your visit?’ John asked him surprisingly optimistically when Brian remained silent for a few seconds.

‘Eh, yes, it was alright. It was good to see my parents again,’ Brian answered stiffly. He felt uncomfortable speaking of having met up with his family while John had been left behind in this room, but John did not seem to mind; and if he did, he hid it surprisingly well behind the smile on his face and the way he encouraged Brian to tell him all about the visit.

Brian hardly dared to look at John while he told him of how his mother had cried through a considerable part of the hour, how they had talked of security and the daily regime and his roommates, and of the books his father had brought for him. John smiled and nodded at all he was told, yet there was something distant in his eyes, his attitude; a reticence that Brian was used to when John was forced to talk to other people, but not when they were speaking just between the pair of them. Maybe it was the fact that Freddie and Roger were present in the room, speaking of songs and music and carrying around their guitars as to convince them to come over and play. Still, Brian had a feeling it was more than this. John was hiding something behind those grey eyes and that forced smile, and he could only guess at what it was.

‘Are you sure everything is alright?’ Brian said while John flicked through the pages of one of the books on planetary development his father had given him. ‘I’m sure you must miss your family on days like this.’

Brian was perceptive enough to see that John momentarily froze, but was resilient enough to then turn the page he had been holding and act as if nothing had happened.

‘It’s not too bad. You get used to it,’ John told him, which Brian was positive was the saddest thing he had heard in quite a while. ‘And besides, if I have you at my side, what reason do I have to complain?’

Brian opened his mouth to say something, but he did not know what. Of course it was incredibly sweet of John to say that he needed nothing more than Brian, but at the same time it was sad - sad that he did not have any other family or friends he could depend on. Despite his parents having dropped him off at this place, Brian could not imagine not being able to be in touch with them through telephone, letters, and visits. The thought that John had lost touch with people outside of Queen Mary’s - be in voluntarily like Freddie had suggested, or involuntarily like John had told him - made Brian’s heart sink in. He wished he could do something for his boyfriend, but he could not get a word past his lips at that given moment. All he managed to do was place his hand on John’s, and give him as much of a comforting smile as he was capable of. He was afraid John would not see this, though, for he avoided his glance with a passion, as if otherwise he could not ensure he would keep his emotions in check.

‘If you want to talk about it, you know you can come to me any time you want to,’ Brian whispered. ‘You can wake me up in the middle of the night if necessary.’ His aim by whispering had been to keep his promise between the pair of them, but Freddie would not have been Freddie if he would not have been eavesdropping on their conversation.

‘Are you two still going to join us, or should we leave the room to you, lovebirds?’ he asked. Brian felt John withdrawing his hand from underneath his own, and at that moment he knew something was wrong with John, whether his partner wished to admit it or not.

‘Of course. We’ll be right over,’ John promised, propping himself further up on his hands and pulling away the duvet. He reacted so quickly to Freddie’s proposal that it made Brian a bit suspicious. Usually heaven and earth would need to be moved first before John would come out of bed, and now one teasing question from their friend was enough to make him jump up and go. John was obviously grasping the opportunity to get away from the conversation Brian was trying to have with him, and although Brian did not want to press him, he could not help being unable to let go of his boyfriend yet.

‘Is something wrong, John?’ Brian asked carefully. ‘You don’t have to tell me, but-’

‘Nothing, honey. I’m doing fine,’ John said, but his eyes told Brian otherwise. He seemed to be aware of this himself, too, for he was quick to walk over and take the bass guitar Roger had been holding for him. ‘Come, let’s go outside. I think we’ll have just about an hour to play before Freddie needs to meet up with his dietician.’

 

# # #

 

‘Roger, get off of that swing. It’s much more useful for Brian to sit down and play than have you toy around with it.’

‘No, then I’ll have nothing to do!’ Roger protested his boyfriend’s order.

‘You could just sit on the ground and keep your clothes clean,’ Freddie said with a nod towards the knee patches of Roger’s jeans, which were soiled in mud after ten consecutive minutes of swinging back and forth. Normally this would have been no problem, had it not been for the fact that Roger could not behave for more than five seconds, and had therefore invented a new position for himself. Instead of sitting on the swing as one was supposed to, he was leaning with his belly on the sitting of the swing, and moved himself back-and forwards by setting off with his knees into the mud.

‘But Brian hasn’t even asked if he could sit here!’ Roger brought in, which was a bad choice - because this, of course, was reason for Freddie to call out to Brian to get his opinion on the matter.

‘Brian, darling, tell Roger he needs to make space for you,’ Freddie said as he turned to his bandmate, only to find that Brian had not been paying attention to their conversation or the fact that Roger had occupied his usual spot on the swing at all. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground next to the swing on which John had gotten down, and had, of course, no interest for anything else than John and the two instruments they shared between them. John had laid down a pretty solid bassline of a song neither of them remembered the name of, and Brian was experimenting to it by adding his own bits and pieces of rhythm to it. They seemed to have forgotten the entire world around them; the only thing they could focus on was their instruments, their music, and every now and then, when they needed each other’s approval, each other’s eyes and smiles.

‘Hey, lovebirds, are you listening?’

Brian looked up at last, slowing down the movements of his fingers. ‘To what?’

‘To me telling Roger to let go of the swing so you can sit down and play more comfortably,’ said Freddie, seeming more bent on winning the argument than on actually dragging Brian up from the cold ground and have him exchange places with his boyfriend.

Brian briefly looked up to see Roger grimacing of the thought of having to give up his only source of entertainment at the moment, and decided not to do this to him. He understood that practicing music was less interesting to Roger because he was the only one not to actually have his instrument with him, and all he could really do was supply Freddie with some backing vocals while swinging to and fro.

‘It’s alright. I’m just fine sitting here,’ he said, looking up to exchange a loving glance with John; one that did not go unnoticed.

‘Are the pair of you planning on saying something about your relationship status one of these days, or will you just keep eye-fucking and pretend that nothing’s going on as if we’re blind?’ Roger asked, receiving a dismissive pat on his blond locks from Freddie as he swung by. Freddie nonetheless seemed glad that the question had been posed, for he looked at his friends in anticipation.

‘What’s there to say?’ John said defensively, which made Freddie roll his eyes.

‘Oh, please. You can’t just stick your tongue down Brian’s throat and then refuse to say anything about it for the rest of the week. And the same goes for you, May.’

Brian blushed and looked at John to find if he would have a proper answer to supply the other couple with. Among the two of them the question of whether they were officially together had already been posed and answered in the affirmative a mere two days after their first kiss, but they had decided to first not share this news with other people. This place was not exactly friendly for sexually deviant people, as they had seen and heard in the slurs people in the hallways would call Freddie, and they preferred not to become a target of homophobia for the time being. Then again, they knew that they could trust Freddie and Roger; they both knew exactly what it was like to be taunted about their sexuality, and would not spread the word if they told them not to. Brian vaguely remembered that upon first meeting him, Freddie had struck Brian as a bit of a gossip in all his flamboyance, but he knew better now. Freddie was shy and reserved when it came to people he did not know, and Brian knew he could trust him to keep a secret with his life. He was unsure if he would bet his life on Roger never gossiping, but what he did know was that Roger practically never talked to anyone else than the three of them, which he decided would do for the moment.

‘Well…’ Brian started, eyes glued on John to see if he agreed with him telling their friends what they had tried to keep a secret for the past week. When John nodded cautiously, he knew he could go ahead. ‘You guys promise not to tell anyone?’

‘Of course we won’t,’ Freddie said, and slapped Roger’s shoulder as he passed by on the swing to make sure he promised the same thing.

‘Okay. Well, so we… we just kind of…’ Brian fiddled with one of the snares of his guitar while trying to find the words. ‘I guess we…’

‘Got together,’ John finished his sentence with a soft, proud smile that made Brian’s heart melt. Seeing that John was happy to call him his boyfriend, even seemed to hold pride in being the one who got to call himself Brian’s better half, warmed his heart more than anything else ever could.

‘That’s such good news! God, I knew it the second we caught you out there kissing the other week,’ Freddie said, all smiles and bright eyes. ‘Roger, I told you they’d be together soon!’ Freddie said with an excited look towards his partner, who looked up and flashed a smug smile at the boys standing across from him.

‘You were, and I can’t believe it! After having pined for each other for God knows how long it’s been, I didn’t think the pair of you would agree to hold hands within now and three months, let alone _kiss_ ,’ Roger grinned.

‘Well, we did decide to take things slow,’ Brian said, not minding the slight tease of Roger’s voice. ‘Nothing, eh, sexual yet. Just cuddling and holding hands and maybe kissing every now and then.’

‘Kissing? Don’t you agree that that is a very raunchy thing to do so quickly?’ Freddie asked.

‘No tongue involved! Just- pecking, really,’ Brian said, the irony of Freddie’s voice seeming to fly right over his head.

‘Darling, I’m _kidding_. It’s a very good decision. You shouldn’t hurry any of this - enjoy every second of your puppy love,’ Freddie said, a term which Brian associated more with preteens than men of their own age, and he could not help blushing.

Roger, seeming to pick up on Brian’s insecurity, said: ‘I’m glad for you, guys. I’m sure you’ll make an amazing couple,’. Brian could appreciate his sincere and serious voice very well, but Freddie seemed to consider him too reserved.

‘You’re glad? That’s about the understatement of the century! I’m so happy for you I could scream it off the _roofs_ , darlings!’ he cooed loudly enough for Brian to peer over his shoulder to check if no one of the two or three occasional wardens marching around the gardens had overheard him.

‘Yeah, so, er… please don’t do that..?’ he half-said, half-asked in response to Freddie’s claim that he wanted to tell the whole world of their newly formed relationship. ‘We’d rather not have everybody know for… you know, certain reasons,’ Brian said. Without even having to mention the event of Freddie having been shoved into a wall and called a ‘dumb fag’ just that morning, and someone having carved the same word into their door the other day, everyone seemed to understand, and wordlessly agreed to keeping the news among the four of them.

‘I know, dears. I wish this was a place where we could all be ourselves, but I’m afraid it’ll take quite a while until we get to that point,’ Freddie sighed, wrapping his thin arms around his body.

‘It’d be nice if they got homosexuality out of the DSM for a start,’ John grumbled.

‘Out of the what?’ Roger said, looking up at him innocently.

‘The book that decides which one of us are idiots and which are less big idiots,’ John offered in an explanation. Brian felt Roger’s big, blue puppy eyes turning into his direction for an actually helpful answer to his question.

‘He means the manual that’s used by doctors and psychiatrists to determine if a patient is suffering from a certain disorder,’ Brian told him. ‘As it is right now, homosexuality is classified as a sexual orientation disturbance.’

‘Oh, great,’ Roger rolled his eyes. ‘So I got here for a depression and drug addiction, but might go in for a long stay because I realised I was gay the moment I came harder than any girl had ever made me do when Freddie deepthroated me?’

‘Roger, language!’ Freddie squealed indignantly - not so much because what Roger and he did in the shower every morning was classified as a state secret, but because he knew that Brian was probably a bit too prude to hear such indecent descriptions of their sex lives, and because John was never especially willing to listen to them, either.

‘What? They’re a couple now, it’s going to be part of their daily life soon. If it’s not part of it already,’ Roger said with a widening grin on his face. Brian was unsure what to say, and wordlessly turned to John for assistance.

‘Of course it is. The reason I claimed this swing is because I can’t stand on my legs any longer after Brian rawed me last night for hours on end,’ John said in the most serious voice he could produce. Brian almost dropped the guitar from his fingers and he felt all colour leave his face.

‘I didn’t- we never even touched each other last night-’ he started helplessly under the intense gaze of Roger and the winking eye of Freddie.

‘Of course not, love. They know I’m joking. It’s not as if I could do as much as kiss your cheek without having those two spies eavesdropping on us,’ John said, giving Brian’s hand a comforting pat.

‘I need _something_ to keep me busy while the three of you practice,’ Roger shrugged, the movement of which almost made him lose his balance and tumble right off the swing, if it had not been for Freddie quickly reaching out and holding him in place by tangling his fingers into the fabric of his grey uniform shirt.

‘Why, I’ll give you something to keep you busy. We haven’t talked about naming our band yet,’ Freddie told him, by saying this not only attracting the attention of Roger but also that of Brian and John. The other day they had talked of trying to see if they could combine their powers and put the ideas they had for playing together into practice, see if they could make decent covers out of songs they knew, or even produce something themselves. It was all very tentative, given that they hardly had the proper tools, that there was no decent space to practice, and that though Roger played drums, he could do nothing more than stomp his feet to create a rhythm as it was. But with Freddie and Roger being able to sing, Freddie and Brian trying their hand at writing songs, and all of them willing to get together and practice their long-lost hobbies, it did not seem like an entirely fruitless idea to Brain. Of course, no one else besides Freddie actually had confidence that it would take them anywhere further than amusing themselves while locked inside the walls of Queen Mary’s. But since no one had the heart to crush Freddie’s hopes - and since they needed some glimpse of hope for the future in order not to give up in this dark time of their lives just as much as he did - they just let him be. They had unanimously decided to give it a shot and see how far they could get if they actually bundled their musical talents and whatever remained of their willpower to make something out of their lives; what else was there to lose than time and effort they did not have any other destination for anyway at this soul-drenching place?

‘So it’s actually a band, then?’ Brian asked.

‘Why, of course it is!’ Freddie said enthusiastically. ‘What else would you call four talented musicians working together to create music?’

‘You’ve got a broad definition of ‘talent’ and ‘musician’ there, Bulsara,’ John said as he strummed his bass. ‘I haven’t played in years and even when I did, I never performed anything spectacular.’

‘Yes, because you never had the time and the feeling for it!’ Freddie brought in. ‘But now we’re here, we don’t have much else to do apart from seeing a therapist once a day for an hour, so you can spend all the rest of your time on practicing!’

 _It really shows he’s the only one out of us without a depression at moments like these,_ Brian thought dimly to himself, but he decided not to utter any of these words - the somewhat dirty but mainly exhausted look John sent Freddie seemed enough for him to get the message across. Instead, Brian found himself saying: ‘So what kind of name were you thinking about?’

‘In terms of a band name?’ Freddie asked, leaning back against the iron frame of the swing. ‘Oh, I think we should have something that really defines us. It should be something that binds us, that brought us together, and that shows people who we are. It should have a certain catch to it and stick with you, something clever, you know? Something that will put us apart from other band names.’

Roger, sounding inspired by this talk of his boyfriend, asked: ‘So what should that be?’

‘Well, I’ve been thinking of that, of course. Something clever I thought we could do would be The Button Up Club.’

Three pairs of eyes turned to meet Freddie’s, and upon seeing that there was not a single trace of irony or sarcasm in them, the silence that had fallen between the boys for a few seconds was broken by roaring laughter from John and Roger. Even Brian - although not willing to make fun of anyone, and certainly not of someone as sweet and sensitive as Freddie - allowed himself to crack a smile at this totally ridiculous idea.

‘What? Why is everyone laughing?’ Freddie asked. He sounded so serious and indignant by the reaction his idea was met with that none of them could contain themselves. Whilst Brian covered his mouth to hide his laughter as much as possible, Roger simply let his body fall backwards off the swing and stayed in the mud beneath the construction as he wiped away tears of laughter with a rough gesture of his hand.

‘Because you- you started off so seriously and philosophically, and then you bring us the big news and it’s the silliest thing I’ve heard since you said you… you thought potatoes grew on trees,’ Roger managed between helpless laughter.

‘Why, how am _I_ supposed to know how potatoes grow?’ Freddie asked, which only functioned to amuse his friends even more. ‘All I care about is how much calories they contain!’

‘We know, Fred, we know. One can’t be a master of everything,’ John chuckled, seeming to have pulled himself together again - or, that was, at least to talk again. ‘Please elaborate on your artistic choices that brought you to the invention of the Button Up Club,’ he said with badly oppressed sarcasm in his voice, which Freddie seemed to decide to ignore in order to tell them his idea behind the name.

‘Well, we’re all wearing the same shirt style, right? These shirts with buttons?’ Freddie said as his thin fingers opened- and then closed the three decorative buttons on his henley shirt. ‘It’s the first thing I noticed when Brian walked into our dorm room, that he wore the same shirt we do. And didn’t it all start off when Brian was given a guitar?’

Brian was pondering about what to say against this, because really, he would rather not touch his guitar ever again than be known as the guitarist in an amateur band called the Button Up Club, regardless of whether he had played a part in the foundation of starting a band. He did not get the chance to speak up, though - Roger had come up with a smart comment before he could.

‘But we’re also all wearing socks. By that logic we might also call ourselves the Sock Society.’

‘Let’s call ourselves the Boxer Shorts Brigade,’ John said to make things just a bit worse than they were already for Freddie’s theory.

‘Guys…’ Freddie grumbled, even though he could not oppress a smile himself. He was probably starting to see that the ‘clever and playful name’ he had come up with really was only fit as an anecdote for years later when looking back at this project, not for actually christening it that.

‘Oh, we couldn’t. Freddie likes going commando - he’s quite the exhibitionist at times,’ Roger said with a cheeky grin. Brian, knowing that this conversation was not exactly going into a direction he was comfortable with, sought something to distract himself, which he found in a life sizedbill board announcing the name of their institution just outside the fences. He had seen the thing before; it was a wooden monstrosity, painted over multiple times with a variety of dark blue colours, which made it look like a cheap announcement made by fifth graders for a yard sale of which the profits would go to the local scouting club. It looked cheap and ugly, much like anything else at this place. Queen Mary’s - as if there was anything majestic about this former prison turned to detention centre for the mentally ill.

Freddie, who gave his partner a bit of a pat against the back of his head following his suggestive comment, told him: ‘You’re lucky you’re not longer sitting on that swing, because I would have pushed you right off it.’ Then, with an overly dramatic sigh, he said: ‘So I’m taking it my idea has been rejected?’

‘Without a doubt,’ John let his roommate know. ‘I understand you might want to pick a name that displays something that we all have in common, but this really isn’t the right field to pick from.’

‘You might want to go for The Depressions if you want something we all have in common,’ Roger said, showing again that dark humour really was something he had no trouble with.

‘But I don’t have a depression,’ Freddie reminded him.

Roger, who scrambled off the ground and did not mind to pat the dirt off his trousers before sitting down on the swing, corrected himself: ‘Anorexia and the Depressions, then.’

‘Like Cliff Richards and the Shadows and Gary Lewis and the Playboys?’ John asked. Freddie nodded as if John had perfectly embodied the feeling he was going for with the newly proposed name, but when John shook his head, it was clear that the idea had also been rejected. ‘Let’s not go there if we don’t want to be seen as one of those overly gallant early sixties bands that make me nervous whenever I look at them. It’s the seventies, after all. New times, new names.’

Everyone was quiet for a moment, until Freddie broke the silence. ‘I’ve got something!’ he exclaimed enthusiastically. ‘3DNA, three depressions and anorexia! We could do an n as in the letter or the &-sign for the and-sound.’ His eyes were glowing at his own invention, leaving the others careful with their judgement to this smart yet vulnerable name.

‘I mean… it sure is clever,’ Roger said. ‘I’m just not too sure if I want everyone out there to know about our medical situations, as it is.’

John joined in on this opinion. ‘It’s clever, it has dimension, but perhaps a bit too much dimension.’

‘The Dimensions, then?’ Roger asked, but John shook his head.

‘I have as much dimensions as a ditch in summer. Not going to work.’

‘Much like us,’ Freddie remarked. ‘The Unemployed?’

‘Keeping up with you is a full time job, though,’ John threw in. Although his attention was still concentrated on the wooden sign rather than the conversation, Brian could not oppress a smile; it was not a comment he would have made or even come up with himself, but now that he had heard it, it did not surprise him that John had made it. It was typically him to say something the like; to seize the opportunity of saying something sarcastic whenever he could. It was John’s type of humour, and quite frankly, Brian was starting to appreciate it more and more every day.

Freddie rolled his eyes. ‘Smartass… the Smartasses?’

‘I believe all of us ‘smartasses’ dropped out of university. Apart from you and your art college, then,’ Roger teased, which earned him a smack to his backside and a quasi-indignant boyfriend who stuck out his tongue towards him.

‘As if you did so well with your dentistry study. The 24/7s then, because you’re all so busy keeping up with me,’ Freddie proposed.

John considered for a moment. ‘Could work. The only problem is that I spend most of that time lying in bed staring at the ceiling instead of actually paying attention to you, Fred.’

‘The Ceiling Starers!’ Roger exclaimed, which drew a grimace to John’s face.

‘We might as well call ourselves the Button Up Club then.’

‘I still like that name, though!’ Freddie threw in.

‘For the love of God...’ John rolled his eyes, before turning to his partner. ‘Bri, do you have any better options, before we’re stuck with the Button Up Club?’

Freddie protested in the background to his idea of a band name being treated to disrespectfully, but Brian was too far away to focus on much more than the fact that John had asked him to come up with a name. ‘Me?’ he asked, a terribly off-key note slipping from his guitar strings when he abruptly had to switch his focus from his precious instrument towards the conversation the rest of the group had been invested in. Surely, he had heard something about buttons, depressions, and ceilings, but all he knew about these was that they must have all been rejected, or else John would not have come to him to ask him to share his views, he assumed.

‘Yes, you, honey. You seemed pensive,’ John said.

‘Yeah, well…’ Brian, who in fact had been staring at the billboard announcing the name of the institution just outside the fences of Queen Mary’s rather than coming up with a name, had to dig deeply to say something sensible now that everyone was looking at him for an idea. ‘I think Freddie’s right in that we should pick something that binds us, and something that got us here,’ Brian repeated his roommate’s words. ‘And I’m not talking about interweaving our depressions and medicines into the band name, but something that’s a bit more neutral but that still related to all of us.’

‘Room 43?’ Roger asked in a voice so serious that it left Brian wondering if it had been a joke or if Roger really thought he was planning on naming their group after their dormitory.

‘No, not like that. I was thinking…’ Brian introduced, not taking his eyes off the billboard. Queen Mary’s Psychiatric Institution. Queen Mary’s. _Queen_. _Queen!_ ‘You know, this place is called Queen Mary’s. Why not call ourselves Queen?’

Everyone was silent for a few seconds. Brian looked up shortly, but upon meeting nothing but empty gazes focussed on him, he was quick to avert his sight back to the sign again. Queen Mary’s. Queen.

‘Queen?’ John repeated him after what felt like a thousand hours to Brian.

‘I mean, it’s only a suggestion, but…’ he was quick to add. The name of the institution seemed to be engraved on his retina, and even when he closed his eyes, he could still see it in front of him. Queen Mary’s. It was something that bound them together, surely, but perhaps this was just as childish as the Button Up Club or whatever it was that Freddie had proposed. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying. Just forget about it,’ he quickly waved away the idea when it elicited no reaction from his friends whatsoever, but Freddie wouldn’t let him.

‘No, don’t forget about it,’ Freddie said. ‘I think it’s a bloody good idea.’

‘You do?’ Brian asked him. He was a bit surprised; he had brought up the name more out of necessity because the boys had asked him for one rather than because he really thought it was a good idea. Perhaps it did have something after all - it was quick, it was easy, and it was original. But that anyone would be as enthusiastic about it as Freddie was, was not something Brian would have expected.

‘Yeah, I think it’s a great plan! Queen really has a certain edge to it, you know? It sounds very daring and bold, which is exactly what we should be,’ Freddie said, the sparkle in his eyes betraying that he could hardly contain his excitement.

‘It does sound daring for four boys to call their group Queen, I think,’ John agreed.

‘We could have the Q as our logo, I’m pretty sure there aren’t too many bands with names that start with a Q out there,’ Roger suggested, which nearly had Freddie jumping up and down with enthusiasm, if only his body could have supported this.

‘Oh, I can totally see that work out! Queen sounds perfectly _arrogant_ and _outrageous_ and-’

Freddie’s voice suddenly died out; the lively expression on his face changed for a painful one, as if someone had just stabbed him in his back. Freddie reached out a hand to one of the iron poles of the swing set as to steady himself, which attracted the attention of Roger and Brian.

‘Freddie, what’s wrong?’ Brian asked, immediately sensing that something was coming over him. He could not put his finger on exactly what it was, and Freddie did not seem willing to admit whatever it was that had suddenly hit him.

‘Nothing, darling. Just suddenly feeling kind of faint.’ Freddie tried to smile, but when he clutched at his own forehead, Brian had a feeling something was going terribly wrong. He turned out to be right; Freddie put a hesitant step into his direction, a second one, before he collapsed from seemingly out of nowhere, his eyes rolling back and his entire body going limp.

‘Freddie!’ Brian cried out as he leapt forwards the moment he saw Freddie falling. His reaction time was quicker than he ever could have expected himself; he caught Freddie’s left wrist first, and, as he pulled Freddie’s collapsing body against his torso, he snaked an arm around his back to prevent him from falling to the ground.

‘Fuck, Freddie-’ Roger gasped, frozen in his half-hanging position on the swing and watching with big, troubled eyes as Brian stood there with his boyfriend in his arms.

‘I’ve got him, I-I’ve got him,’ Brian said more surely than he felt; he was too frozen with panic to do more than stand there and cling on to Freddie’s body as if it was his last hope of survival, but on the inside, he was on fire. ‘John, help me! What do I- what do I _do_?’

‘Stay calm. Stay calm, he’ll wake up in a moment,’ Roger comforted him while both he and John jumped of the swing and gathered around Brian.

Now having put his bass guitar aside and standing across from Brian, John reached out towards their unconscious friend to take him from Brian’s shaky grip. ‘Give him to me and sit down on the ground,’ he said remarkably calmly, which Brian thought was both a blessing and a curse. Admittedly, he would have lost it if John had started to panic, but at the same time, he could slap John in the face for remaining so untouched and reasonable now that their roommate had passed out.

‘I don’t- John, I don’t know what to _do_!’ Brian realised he was practically wheezing, but he could not help it. Freddie’s cold, emaciated body felt so fragile against his torso that he feared if he ever would wake up from his state of unconsciousness, and the thought of his friend having stood around talking about naming their band one moment and transforming into what seemed like a motionless figure the other was too much for him to handle. Freddie’s body was weighing down on him - not so much his physical weight, but the emotional toll of clinging on to someone you feared was in danger of losing his life.

John and Roger, on the other hand, did not seem to share these fears. ‘It’s okay, because I know what to do. Just do as I tell you. Let me have him and sit down on the grass,’ John insisted, and Brian, with fear in his heart, levelled Freddie from his own grip into that of John’s surprisingly strong arms with the help of Roger. Not that strength was needed all too much; Brian was rather sure the average person could have kept up Freddie’s emaciated body that had hardly hit above ninety pounds on the scale last week, if he remembered correctly.

‘Okay, I’ve got him,’ John said, throwing one arm around the back of Freddie’s knees and heaving him up in his arms to have a better grip on him. ‘Now, if you’d sit down, I’ll level him down and let his head rest in your lap, alright?’

Brian was frozen into his position for a moment, but after a few tense seconds, he was able to carry out John’s command. He sat down, and with the help of Roger, John got to his knees and carefully placed Freddie down on the grass, his legs first, then his torso, and eventually putting his head in Brian’s lap. Brian was still in a state of shock and could barely move; he had never witnessed anyone fainting right there in his presence. The fact that both of his roommates stayed perfectly calm, that they told him they knew exactly what to do, hardly seemed to help Brian take back control of himself - especially not when John got up and announced he would be right back.

‘I’m going inside for the usual. You stay here with Brian, Roger. Make sure he keeps supporting Freddie’s head,’ he said before he wanted to take his leave.

‘John…’ Brian whispered in a plea for John to stay with him, but John wouldn’t - couldn’t, rather.

‘Roger’s too weak, he can’t run,’ John explained shortly. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he promised, and with that, turned on his heel and ran towards the entrance of the building that suddenly seemed a hundred miles away to Brian. Everything had happened so quickly he hardly could comprehend what had happened. One moment he had been leaning against the swing set and playing with his guitar, and the next moment he was sitting on the ground with his unconscious friend in his lap.

‘Roger, what’s happening? What’s… happening with Freddie?’ he asked.

‘He’s just fainted. Have you never seen that before?’ Roger said, sounding surprisingly calm; as if he had seen it happen a thousand times before, which Brian would later come to realise might not even be too far from the truth. God knew what had gone down with Freddie in the months the other boys had been here before Brian had joined in on them.

Roger seemed to have come to his own conclusion when Brian just stared at him. ‘No, you weren’t there when he fainted in the bathroom two weeks ago or so… Either way, it happens at times,’ Roger said, holding his hand over Freddie’s mouth and nose as to see if he was still breathing regularly.

‘Is John going to get a help? A nurse or so?’ Brian asked.

‘No, he knows Freddie would hate that. They’d bring him to the infirmary and keep him there for at least a week.’

To Brian this did not seem like a bad idea at all at the moment. He knew the couple, and especially Freddie himself, would hate for him to be taken away from their room and brought into the infirmary - but God, one look at that pale face, rail thin arms, and overall fragility, was enough for Brian to grow a desire to lift Freddie up and bring him over to the nurse on his own.

‘Then what will he do? Should we… should we give mouth to mouth respiration?’ Brian whispered. He tried to dig deeply into his memory as to retract the first aid classes he vaguely remembered having had in eleventh grade, but his mind was blank, so he was left to stare at Roger for an answer.

‘There’s no need, his breathing is regular. John’s just going to get him something to eat. He’s just not eaten yet today,’ Roger said, raking thin fingers through Freddie’s messy black hair. It was just that Brian was too paralysed to do more than sit there and force himself to keep breathing, because he was positive that had he been capable of doing more than that, he would have snapped. How on _earth_ was everybody staying so calm when Freddie was lying unconscious in their arms? Freddie was dangerously underweight, had starved himself all day long under the eyes of Roger, and no one seemed to blink at the situation they were currently finding themselves in.

Just when Brian was about to open his mouth and express one way or another that he could not understand how Roger remained so calm while his own boyfriend had lost consciousness, Freddie moved his head from one side to the other, his long hair tickling Brian’s wrists as he did. His eyes remained close and he did not say a word, and yet, to Brian it felt like a major breakthrough.

‘Freddie?’ he asked carefully. His friend did not respond, but he took in a deep breath and sighed shakily, after which he seemed to try and move his head again.

The careful movements had also attracted the attention of Roger, who kneeled down next to Freddie and protectively bent closer towards him. ‘Freddie, can you hear me?’ Roger squeezed whatever was left of Freddie’s cheek, and a furrow formed between his partner’s eyebrows. Freddie seemed to mumble something that Brian thought came closest to ‘don’t’ or ‘no’ or something the like. Whatever it was, he felt a huge weight falling off his shoulders now that Freddie seemed to be coming back to earth again, although he remained cautious. Freddie still looked pale and fragile as could be, especially now that he refused to open his eyes or speak in more than monosyllables.

Roger asked a few more questions regarding how he felt, if he was okay, and if he could open his eyes, but none of them were met with answers. Upon seeing that Brian became increasingly worried about his weak state of being, Roger said: ‘Darling, say something. Brian is terribly worried.’

‘Mmmh… No need for,’ Freddie mumbled, bringing up one weak wrist to rub his eyes. After having done this, he opened one eye first, then the second, and glanced up to meet Brian’s gaze. He gave him a hint of a smile as to try and console him, but it faded from his face just as quickly as it had appeared when Roger made his next announcement.

‘John’s gone inside to fetch you something to eat.’

‘Also no… no need for,’ Freddie told him, at which Roger rolled his eyes.

‘Oh _please_ , you literally fainted. And you know John won’t take no for an answer.’

Although every second of john’s absence felt like an hour to Brian, the boy still returned remarkably quickly. It was no more than maybe one and a half minute before he appeared in the hallway Brian looked at every five seconds when he allowed himself to take his eyes off Freddie, who seemed to be recovering (or pushed himself to do so) while Roger and him argued whether he needed to eat or not. Brian let them be, and instead focussed on John. He was carrying a cup in one hand and something Brian could not quite make out the shape of in his other, and in a spectacular process he dodged the warden standing in the doorway of the building. Without looking back, John sprinted into the garden, and though the guard shouted something at him, he did not actually follow him. Brian knew this testified for the laxity and lack of professionalism of Queen Mary’s staff, but at the moment, he was kind of glad the man did not follow John. They’d have a _lot_ to explain if he did, and he was sure that Freddie would have hated for anyone else than his friends to hang around him at this particular moment in time.

John gave Brian a smile and a loving pet on his head when he returned to the three of him, as a silent thankyou for having stayed with Freddie and not having run after him when he’d left. There was not too much time for the new couple to spend on each other; they had a severely malnourished roommate to tend to.

‘Well then, it seems like you’ve woken up again,’ John concluded as he crouched down at the other side of Freddie. Placing one of the items on the ground next to him, he held on to the cup he had taken with him. ‘Let’s first have something to drink.’

‘What is it?’ Freddie asked, not protesting when Brian  tried to pull him up a bit so he’d be in a better position to drink.

‘Tea. You need something to warm you up,’ John said.

Though Freddie seemed to embrace this idea at first, he suddenly froze when he realised it was John who had gotten him the drink. ‘Does it have sugar in it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’m not drinking it,’ he said resolutely, but this had no effect on John, who had plans of his own and of whom Brian was already sure was not the person to buck under pressure of Freddie.

‘Oh yes, you are. You need an energy boost or you’ll faint again before you can count to ten.’

‘That really won’t happen-’ Freddie said in an attempt to make John back off, but John seized the opportunity of him opening his mouth to press the cup against his lips and cantle it back just enough to make part of the liquid flow into his mouth. Freddie did not seem to have expected this - none of them had, to be honest - and he ended up coughing out half of the tea that John had managed to put into his mouth so far.

‘John!’ he whined between helpless coughs, seeming very indignant that John had taken this step without his permission. He looked at John contemptuously when the cup was presented to him again, but John was utterly immune to his angry and scornful glances. In fact, the man never took his eyes from Freddie while digging in the back pocket of his trousers, from which he produced numerous sugar cubes which he dangled above the remains of the cup of tea dangerously.

‘You can drink this tea as it is right now, or I can throw some more sugar,’ he warned.

‘I’ll drink neither,’ Freddie said somewhat bitchily, but Brian had grown to understand that this arrogance was just a cover-up for the vulnerability he wanted so desperately to oppress. Freddie was as vulnerable as all of them were, and he had a feeling that it would not take long before he would have to let down the walls he had so carefully constructed around himself - especially if John was going to carry on as he was doing right now.

‘You have to drink something, honey. I can bring you some water if you’d like,’ Roger said softly in an attempt to comfort his boyfriend and to break the tensed silence between the pair. John, however, did not seem keen on negotiating with Freddie now.

‘No one is bringing you water. You’re drinking this tea whether you like it or not. I won’t leave until you’ve downed this entire cup,’ John ordered.

‘You can wait for a long time, then,’ Freddie told him as he rested back on his elbows on the grass.

‘I sure can. _I’m_ not the one who has to meet up with my dietician in half an hour,’ John reminded him, at which Freddie’s smug expression started to show its first signs of insecurity. John, obviously noticing this, added to Freddie’s crumbling pride by proposing: ‘Do you want me to call them over and tell them what just happened to you?’

‘You wouldn’t do that,’ Freddie said, but he didn’t sound too sure of it himself.

‘I’ve had you dragged over to the infirmary before and I won’t hesitate to do it again,’ John said - an event Brian was assumed had happened before he had been admitted to Queen Mary’s, but which the other three boys seemed to remember all too well. At the very least well enough for Freddie to obey when John commanded: ‘Now open your mouth and drink this.’

The cup was placed back against Freddie’s lips, and Brian could swear he could spot tears in Freddie’s eyes as the man slowly, reluctantly downed the remaining contents of the cup. He swallowed painfully with every gulp, and when he had taken the last of it, he was quick to push the cup away and wipe his mouth with his hand, as if that would prevent the last calories from slipping in. Brian could only guess at how much cubes John had dumped into the tea, but looking at the sugary residue that stuck to the bottom of the now discarded plastic cup, it had to be quite a bit. He was not the one to complain about this, though - Freddie desperately needed some energy, and if that had to be done by holding him down and forcing him to drink heavily sugared tea, then so be it.

‘So, that’s what I meant,’ John said, before he turned around. ‘Now, I know you skipped breakfast and ate nothing but three olives and a leaf of lettuce for lunch, so I brought you some yoghurt.’

Freddie, who did not yet seem to have gotten over the fact that he had been made to drink tea with sugar in it mere seconds ago, was quick to protest when John brought up what turned out to be a small plastic cup of yoghurt he must have stolen from the kitchen or so. ‘No,’ Freddie said resolutely. ‘No, I’m seriously not- _no_ ,’ he said, voice choking on transparent teardrops by the mere thought of having to eat.

‘You seriously are,’ John said.

‘I won’t,’ Freddie said, a sound that was a strange mixture of a laugh and a grunt escaping his throat. ‘You’re ridiculous if you think you can… that I will…’

‘We’ll see which one of us will end up being ridiculous,’ John said in that dangerously quiet voice of his, one that made it all too clear he meant business. Freddie understood this, too, and swallowed painfully when John went to pull off the plastic lid of the container.

‘You can’t make me,’ Freddie said in a voice so frail that it already betrayed the fact that everyone, including Freddie himself, knew he was fighting a losing battle.

‘Listen, I don’t mind being the bad guy if that’s what it takes to save you from dying of an eating disorder,’ John said just as quietly as he ripped the lid completely off the small cup of strawberry yoghurt and stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘One hundred fifty millilitre of yogurt. Ninety-eight calories, four grams of sugar, one and a half grams of fat,’ John said expertly; he had probably studied the package on his way outside, knowing Freddie would want to know the particulars about the product. ‘You can either eat it yourself, or have me feed it to you, or Roger, or maybe even Brian might be willing to do it if you ask him nicely. But you’re _going_ to eat this.’

Brian expected Freddie to protest vehemently; expected him to shout or get up and leave. He did none of these, however. Brian was not sure if this was because he was still too fragile to get up on his own account, or if he was starting to accept that he could not avoid eating this time. Either way, he remained exactly where he was while he asked his questions.

‘Or else?’ Freddie asked Roger, tears visible in his eyes.

‘Or else I’ll tell your dietician and your mentor.’

‘But they’d… They’d take me to the infirmary,’ Freddie said it as if John had not taken this consequence into account, whereas in fact, it turned out that this was _exactly_ what his roommate had been aiming for by putting him into this dilemma.

‘I know. Your decision to make,’ John said. He did not blink, did not move, did not bat an eyelid when Freddie clamped a hand over his mouth and looked at him in pure horror.

‘But I don’t want to go there,’ Freddie whimpered, the first sniff that indicated that he was on the verge of breaking down escaping him. ‘There’s nothing… there’s nothing _wrong_ with me!’ he said, before sobs overtook his body.

‘John…’ Brian whispered at his partner. He agreed that Freddie really did have to eat something, but he wondered if John was maybe a bit too harsh on him; not with his actions, but with his emotions. While Freddie was sobbing his heart out right in front of him, John remained stiff like a statue, and expressed no more emotions than Queen Elizabeth II did on the back of a fifty pence coin. Sure enough, Brian understood and vehemently agreed that Freddie should eat something, and he knew that John was not one to make his emotions visible to the entire world, but perhaps a bit more compassion would help Freddie a long way.

‘It’s okay. Don’t worry, Roger’s got this,’ John mouthed at Brian with a nod towards their roommate. Roger had already scooped closer to Freddie and took the boy, who reduced to a sobbing mess as he buried his face in the crook between Roger’s shoulder and neck, into his embrace while whispering quiet consolations at him.

‘I know it’s hard, Freddie, I know,’ Roger said as he carefully rocked Freddie back and forth.

‘I don’t want- you have to promise me you- you won’t sent me to the nurse. There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Freddie managed between sobs that made Brian all the more aware of just how long of a way Freddie still had to go. The smile Roger flashed him over Freddie’s shoulder did not do much for Brian, who was left to watch Freddie trembling out of pure misery - or malnourishment, or possibly a combination of the two - right in front of him.  

‘Honey, you’re literally crying at the thought of eating. You know that’s not healthy,’ Roger carefully reminded him, patting Freddie’s back all the while. Freddie’s shirt had slipped up a bit, and Brian had to face away to keep himself from staring at Freddie’s spine, which practically lay bare directly under the surface of his skin. Brian wondered how they did it, Roger and John - how they remained so cool, calm, and collected, while he was close to screaming at Freddie that he had to eat if he did not want to die. Brian knew this probably worked counterproductively, but God, could someone please _do_ something before Freddie would pass out again?

‘I can’t help it! I can’t eat when you, and John- a-and Brian and everyone-’ Freddie sobbed, but John had a solution for this problem already.

‘Look, Freddie. You have about twenty-five minutes left before your meeting with your dietician. I’m in no hurry. You can sit here, take your time, have a moment to cry - I don’t mind at all. I’ll go and sit over there if you feel like I’m putting too much pressure on you,’ John said as he picked up the spoon he had taken with him. ‘But you’re going to eat this. If you’ve not finished in twenty-five minutes, I’ll tell your dietician. You’re leaving me no other choice.’

‘Brian? Roger…?’ Freddie said in one last attempt to try and see if he could win sympathy for his cause in one of the people around him, but neither of them bucked. Brian shook his head firmly when Freddie turned around to flash his teary eyes up at him, and Roger even took it one step further. Letting go of Freddie’s fragile hands, Roger took the cup and the spoon from John, before turning back to his boyfriend again.

‘Come on, you know Deaky is right. Let’s get it over with. Do you want me to feed you?’

Freddie did not answer - instead, he hung his head and did not seem to dare look up at any of them when Roger brought the first spoonful of yoghurt up to his lips. Brian waited in anticipation; this was the moment of truth, this was when they were going to find out if John’s threats and Roger’s insistence would actually have an effect on the anorexia-inflicted patient, or if Freddie would continue to defy all of their efforts. Brian wondered what would happen if he did. Would John lose his cool, or would he give him the silent treatment? Would Roger simply pin his partner down and make him eat, or would he resort to calling in the help of a nurse or dietician, like John had threatened he’d do if Freddie would not cooperate? And what would happen if they did? Would Freddie indeed be taken into the infirmary for an amount of time, or would the staff at this place do what they always did - look away and ignore problems that took place right under their nose?

They never got to the point where the staff would have to prove their worth, though; because after half a minute of quiet sobbing and ignoring the food presented to him, Freddie eventually gave in to his defeat, and took the spoonful of yoghurt into his mouth and swallowed it down. Brian glanced sideways at John to see his reaction, and saw his boyfriend smile a humble smile and flash him a wink. He did not say anything to Freddie yet though: apart from a few positive comments, he left this to Roger, who patiently sat with Freddie and encouraged him to eat, wiped away his tears, and held one of his twig-like hands throughout the whole matter.

It took a solid twenty minutes, but eventually, with John’s insistence, Roger’s gentleness, and Brian - well, he liked to think that him sitting there and holding Freddie while the man was trembling in misery helped him pull through - they managed to make Freddie consume the contents of the yoghurt can. To Brian, the moment that Freddie ate what Roger announced was the last spoonful, felt like a bigger victory than if the four of them would have reached the peak of the Mount Everest.

‘Look, that was all. You did it,’ Roger smiled - he beamed with pride, really. ‘You did it and I’m very proud of you.’ Freddie didn’t answer, but he did accept the hand Roger offered him once he had gotten up to pull him onto eye level with him, and then fell into his arms again. It was one of those bony hugs that they shared multiple times a day, but this one held more meaning than the average embrace; this one was a hug of pride, endurance, and victory, if not from Freddie’s side, then at least from Roger’s.  

‘You did very well, honey,’ Roger said. ‘I know you don’t look at it like this, but this is one step closer to recovery.’

‘If you say so,’ Freddie sniffled, wiping the last remains of his tears off his face. Roger carefully distanced himself from Freddie - who by now looked stable enough to stand on his own again - and motioned for Brian to get off the ground. Brian had hardly noticed it, but in the meantime everyone around him, including John, had stood up from the ground, so he was quick to jump up.

Roger soon announced what his plan was in having Brian get up. ‘Now, I think Brian needs a hug. You gave him quite a scare when you fainted,’ Roger told his partner quasi-reprimanding, and Freddie laughed despite everything. He turned around to Brian, and before Brian could properly prepare himself for it, flung himself into his arms. For the second time within an hour, he found himself clinging on to Freddie’s body - but, given that it now was a hug of gratitude rather than a helpless attempt of his to prevent Freddie’s body from hitting the ground, Brian liked this time a lot better than their first physical meeting, as it was.

‘Sorry, darling. Didn’t mean to scare you,’ Freddie said when he let go of Brian again after a short but intense hug. He gave Brian a smile that comforted him more than a thousand hugs could have done, and Brian found himself smiling back at his friend, ready to forgive him for all he had put both himself and his friends through.

‘Its… It’s okay. You can’t help it,’ Brian said, but then thought for a second and came back to this. ‘I mean, that I was scared. Or that you fainted. Well, you can actually help that you fainted. You should probably eat more-’ he struggled with his words, and found himself rather relieved when Freddie took over from him.

‘I know. It’s just… it’s just not easy to do so when every fibre in your body is screaming at you not to eat,’ Freddie said. The smile on his face was an apologetic one, and Brian could hardly blame him any longer. No matter how impossible it seemed to him that Freddie would willingly starve himself to the point of losing consciousness while he already was all skin and bones, it was his disease. He could not help it; just as much as Brian himself could not help his depression and his borderline. The best they could do was support him in his convalescence.

‘I know. That’s why we’re here with you,’ Brian said, after which they fell into each other’s arms again. Brian was not usually one for physical contact, but right now he could not help himself; after having seen Freddie hit an all time low during which he had actually feared for his life, he would do everything that was in his power to see him smile as he could feel him do against his shoulder right now. He felt Roger’s hand on his shoulder as to wordlessly thank him for his support, and in that moment, Brian forgot all the troubles he dealt with on a daily basis. His mental illnesses, therapy group, the terror that was Drew and his gang, the death of Jimmy, Freddie’s eating disorder, Roger’s drug addiction, John’s and whatever it was he was trying to keep from him; everything was perfect. In that specific moment, everything was perfect - apart from one thing that Brian figured might need some fixing.

‘And what about John?’ Brian asked when Freddie and he had distanced themselves from each other again. ‘Doesn’t he deserve a hug, too?’

‘John?’ Freddie repeated; he looked unsure as he glanced into the direction of their roommate, who had settled on the swing again in the meantime. ‘He doesn’t usually want to hug, you know,’ he mumbled as an excuse. Whereas he had been bright mere seconds ago, he seemed to shut down at the mere mentioning of John’s name.

John himself did not seem very enthusiastic about the plan too. It did not surprise Brian that John seemed to have paid attention to their conversation - he always was more observant than people gave him credit for - but what did surprise him was the touch of guilt in his voice when his partner said: ‘Nor did Freddie seem very happy I forced that tea and yoghurt down his throat.’

Brian’s glance rested between the two of them. It struck him in that moment how different they were; how outgoing and lively Freddie could be, while John with his reservation and quietness was his polar opposite. Right now, however, they both seemed equally reticent and somewhat bashful about recent events, which Brian decided he could work with.

‘I know. But that’s all said and done now, and we can move forwards from that. And what better way to close this off by sharing a hug?’ Brian said with an innocent shrug. Freddie looked at John somewhat shyly; Brian could tell he was in favour of the plan, but that he did not dare approach his roommate, who was staring at him as if his fight or flight response would kick in the second Freddie would place a single step into his direction.

Unfortunately for John, he was probably the only one against the plan Brian had proposed. Freddie kept looking at him with a cautious yet slightly hopeful expression in his eyes, Brian encouraged them once more, and eventually, Roger jumped in on Brian’s cause as well.

‘Come on, guys. Do it for Brian, if not for yourselves,’ Roger insisted.

Silence for another second or so - but then they finally had a breakthrough.

‘Alright then, come here.’ Freddie was the first to give in and open his arms, and John, miraculous as it may be, did not hesitate to walk over to him and catch him in a tight embrace.

Brian was ready to take back all he had said about Freddie finally eating being the major victory; this right here was the real moment of glory of the day. To see Freddie and John, who moments ago could have been at each other’s throats if they had not been in the presence of their friends, now ready to understand and accept each other’s motives and move on as the friends they deep inside were, was the biggest victory of them all to Brian. Because they were friends through it all; no matter how annoying and over-the-top John thought Freddie was, and no matter how boring and lifeless Freddie found John, they would always be fond of each other, always support each other, always be there for each other if necessary. The hug they shared and the words they spoke only served to prove these feelings they would usually keep hidden deep inside.

‘I’m sorry for worrying you all so much,’ Freddie sighed. ‘I never meant to do that.’

‘And I’m sorry for being so blunt with you. You know I only want the best for you,’ John mumbled as he repeatedly patted Freddie’s back.

‘I know. You just have a curious way of showing me,’ Freddie huffed out a laugh, removing the last remains of his tears off his face when they parted.

‘We can’t _all_ go around screaming and crying to display our feelings like the drama queen you are, Bulsara,’ John reproved him, but the tone of it immediately made clear that he was joking, and gave Freddie the opportunity to do the same.

Freddie rolled his eyes and gave John a weak push against his shoulder. ‘Drama Queen. Maybe we should call our band that.’

‘I haven’t felt a single emotion since August 1967, let alone that I showed one,’ John reminded him, but Freddie begged to disagree.

‘Liar. We caught you red-handed sticking your tongue down Brian’s throat the other week. Are you trying to tell me that doesn’t classify as showing your emotions?’

For a moment Brian thought Freddie had gotten John trapped, but John was smoother than ever in his reply. ‘No, that’s just how I greet fellow depression patients. You wouldn’t know, but you can ask Roger. He’s had my tongue down his throat more often than your cock’s been there. _Darling_ ,’ John topped off this reply that sounded like it could come right out of Freddie’s mouth. Freddie was left to gaze at his rival while Brian smiled and Roger erupted into laughter loud enough to drown out any reply Freddie might have wanted to bring up against John. Unfortunately for him, though, he was left speechless, and it was only by the time that Roger had already pulled himself together again that he eventually opened his mouth.

‘You’re _insufferable_ , Deacon,’ he told him, which John accepted with a smile.

‘As are you,’ John threw back at him good-naturedly, before he turned around and picked up the bass guitar he had left against the swing set the moment Freddie had fainted - an event that seemed a million miles away now that everyone was smiling again. ‘But I believe it’s almost two, and that it’s about time we’d drop you off at your dietician’s office.’

Nods were exchanged at this proposal, the remains of the meal were thrown into the bin, instruments were collected; and soon enough, Brian found himself walking next to John as they followed Freddie and Roger on the way back inside the building. Freddie was back to his normal self again, and although he was obviously not happy about having to see his dietician, Roger clung on to his hand as a sign of love and support, and not as away to make sure he would not run off and escape his appointment, as Brian had been afraid he might do.

Staring at the entangled fingers Roger and Freddie swung back and forth at the rhythm of their footsteps, Brian could no longer oppress the question that had been on his mind ever since John had returned with the tea and yogurt and had forced Freddie to eat it with as much confidence as he had done. ‘How did you know this was going to work?’ he asked softly, giving a glance at the boy walking next to him.

John had no trouble knowing what he was referring to, and answered the question as if it was the most normal thing in the world. ‘Because we’ve been here before. Roger and I have a tactic for this. Do you know the good cop-bad cop strategy police uses during interrogation?’ The frown Brian flashed him was enough to tell him he had no idea, and John patiently explained. ‘Alright, so while interrogating suspects, police sometimes use this tactic where one cop will be cruel and unforgiving for the suspect and push him to the breaking point, while the other will comfort them and draw them to their side. And so it goes - we decided that I’m the one who doesn’t bat an eyelid no matter what Freddie says or does to escape having to eat, and Roger will hush him and eventually be the one to make him eat.’

The technique did not ring a bell for Brian, but then again, he had never been in touch with law. Would John perhaps…?

His partner seemed to understand the doubtful glance Brian gave him, and chuckled to himself. ‘To answer the question I know you want to ask but don’t dare to - I’ve never been arrested and interrogated. But I had social sciences in high school where I must have picked this up.’

‘Right,’ Brian agreed. ‘And so you looked at Freddie and thought, why not implement this technique?’

‘Well, not like that,’ John smiled. ‘But I noticed soon enough that he would draw to Roger whenever I criticised him for his eating habits. Or his not eating habits, that is,’ John corrected himself. ‘So I brought it up to Roger sometime, that we could try and see if we could cooperate to try and get Freddie to eat in situations like these. And Freddie appeared to be very vulnerable to it. He needs a bit of tough love every now and then. They _both_ do, for that matter,’ John said with the slightest bit of a self-contented smile.

Although he knew he should not be, Brian was once again surprised by the empathy and both desire and capabilities of helping people when they needed it most. He kept to himself so much that an outsider would never spot this hidden side of his personality, but when one managed to get closer to him, he could blow you away with just how perfectly aware he was of what was going down with the people around him, and how to step up for their best interest. It was John’s hidden talent to know exactly how people felt on the inside, and when they needed an outsider to come in and help them out - a talent that would come out when people needed support most, such as Brian after Roger’s heroin slip, after Jimmy’s death, and just moments before, Freddie in state of physical exhaustion he had brought on to himself. John kept himself aside for most of the time, but in your hour of need, he would always be the one to know exactly how to help you. He would be at your side like your own shadow following you in the rain; a quiet, hidden, yet comforting presence.

Brian said something he never would have believed he would ever say to John upon first meeting him. ‘You’re so good at taking care of others. Knowing what they need and when they need it.’

John, perfectly in character, would not take the compliment. ‘Why, I wouldn’t say that necessarily… I just tend to get really insistent when people don’t take good care of themselves. If they don’t do it themselves, I’ll step in and do it for them.’

Whereas John shrugged as he made this last comment, Brian thought it was one of the most meaningful things he’d ever heard him say in the context of his relationship in respect to people around him. John himself might not think much of it, but it really said a lot about his character, the person he was deep inside, that he was the one to look after people when they could not take care of themselves. No matter how depressed he was himself, no matter how far he would slip into the darkness that was his own mind, he would always remain vigilant enough to be ready to step in and take control over the mess that was other people’s situations - something Brian doubted he did for himself. Because now that he got right down to it, what did John do to help himself? While having been right by Brian’s side through everything he had gone through since he got here and making sure their roommates would not exhaust themselves, what had John done to take care of himself? John deserved the world, but he had proven himself to be reticent when it came to his own desires. After all, he had kept his bass guitar playing to himself for ages, tended to run off to his cave or avoid contact with ninety-nine per cent of Queen Mary’s population, and Brian was positive that there was more to him not seeing any visitors than simply not having the privileges. John deserved the world, but he would not even allow himself the sunlight in his own eyes. John was there for whoever needed him, but when would he start being there for himself?

‘I wish you would take good care of yourself too.’

The words had escaped Brian before he could fully realise it - and he was unsure if it was him or John who halted their steps first. Either way, he found himself paralysed, unable to walk any further, standing eye to eye with John who seemed to  seemed to find himself in the same state.

‘I do take care of myself,’ John said, but Brian knew he doubted it himself when he faced away and did not dare look into his direction again, and resorted to kicking his left foot against a pluck of grass to give himself something to shift the focus away from the conversation. Brian did not fall for it.

‘Are you sure?’ Now that he had posed the dangerous question already, he might as well carry on with it. Withdrawing was not an option now - and he found out quickly enough that even if he could have done so, he would not have taken the opportunity. He would not want to miss the words John spoke to him for the world.

‘Of course I do. I let you in, and that’s the best thing I could ever do for myself.’

Brian did not know how he did it, and had a feeling he never _would_ figure out how John could go from all private and business-like to spilling words that came right from the bottom of his heart. What he did know was that he was touched, in that way no one else but John could do to him - and that no words from his side could say anything that would ever come close to matching the meaning behind John’s answer. He would have to do something else to show John his affection.

Brian hastily looked around, both to check if there were no eavesdroppers or other kinds of spies running around the place and to hide the mollified smile he knew for a fact was starting to form on his face. There was no one around; no one apart from a disinterest guard reading a porn magazine of some sort in the hallway, of whom Brian was rather positive he had nothing to fear. It was as safe as it ever could be at this point in time, and even if it had not been, Brian had a feeling this would not stop him either. The entire world could be looking on right now, all of the promises they had made about their privacy and what could happen if people found out about their relationship would go right out of the window - because Brian wanted to kiss John, more than he had ever done before, and he was going to go for it whether their surroundings were appropriate for the move or not.

They were already standing close enough to each other for Brian to be in reach to kiss John if he would have wanted to, but he preferred to stand nearer to him - to stand near enough to close every millimetre of space between them and kiss him like he had never done before. The first of these aims was not physically possible, so Brian decided to put all his shots on the second one by tugging John closer and plastering his lips against John’s as if it was both the first and the last kiss they’d ever share.

John obviously was surprised by Brian’s sudden action, but he did not resist; rather, he accepted it with more enthusiasm as Brian could have expected. He had been a tad afraid that John would pull away given the situation they were finding themselves in at the moment, but he did not. Either John knew the coast was clear, or he simply did not care if anyone saw, just like Brian did. Knowing that John had not been given the time to look around and check their surroundings before Brian had planted his lips on those of his partner, he guessed it was the latter of these options. There was generally no one around in the gardens, and the only two people of whose presence they were sure, they knew would not cause any problems.

Although… Just when Brian’s hand had slipped from the back of John’s head and he was about to deepen the kiss, Freddie’s voice calling out to them abruptly broke them apart.

‘So that’s what’s taking you so long!’ Freddie said, sounding more amused than seriously indignant. Brian was going to open his mouth and give a reply - something along the lines of either an apology or a saucy reply that would be closer to what Freddie would have done if he had been caught in the same situation - but he managed neither of them before Freddie spoke up again. ‘Loveys, you can get to that in a moment, but we’ll need to hurry up or they’ll take away my privilege points for showing up late!’ Grabbing a tighter hold on Roger’s hand, Freddie resolutely turned around to make clear he meant business, which left Brian and John gazing at each other for a second.

‘What would they do? Take away his eyeliner?’ John asked, and Brian chuckled.

‘His hair dryer?’ Brian added.

‘His admission to the library he hasn’t set a foot inside ever since he signed us all up for that stupid volunteer event?’

‘Darlings!’ Freddie called out again as he looked over his shoulder and saw his friends still hadn’t moved a single step closer to them.

‘That indignant voice of his, maybe. Would be nice if they could do something about that,’ John rolled his eyes, and Brian smiled. Normally it might have made him feel awkward to have John make a comment like this about one of his friends, but right now he could see John was just joking. After just having gone through all of that trouble to make sure Freddie would eat, and having admitted that he had come up with a psychological tactic to help Freddie in moments like these, there could not be a single doubt that John loved Freddie as much as they all did. No matter what passed between those two polar opposites, at the end of the day, when everything was said and done, John would be there for him, as Freddie would be for him. As all of them would do for each other. They were friends, after all. More than that - at this point, they felt like family.

‘Well, you heard him. Better get going then,’ Brian said with an apologetic smile. John grabbed his hand and gave it a bit of a squeeze, intertwining his fingers with Brian’s and not letting go of them until they reached the door through which their friends had already disappeared into Queen Mary’s.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woohooo, that was it! I hope you enjoyed reading, and that I’ve sparked your interest concerning John’s situation, because his (lack of) social contacts is going to lead to certain places and situations in upcoming chapters. Chapter 13 has not been finished as of yet, but it will consist of two longer scenes mostly dealing with John and Brian, the latter of which will disclose a little more about John’s situation - not enough to actually figure out what’s going on, but enough to make you desperate about finding out more about his backstory (or that’s my goal at any rate). I hope I’ll be able to finish it and present it to you guys soon! In the meantime, please tell me what you thought about this chapter, or the story in general, I’m dying to hear your opinions!


	13. Part Thirteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hi dear people! As promised on Tumblr yesterday, here is Chapter 13 of The Clinic - in which John stands up for his friends in a somewhat unorthodox manner, and in which Brian finally gets to see a tiny hint of all that lies behind John’s quietness, but which at the same time also causes a bit of a crisis for the both of them. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this part! 
> 
> My thanks go out to @vampireluph for proofreading!

‘If Drew and Jake open their mouth one more time, I _swear_ to God I’ll punch them in the face.’

The door was slammed shut behind a more than agitated looking Roger, whose expression was filled with both anger and fear. He didn’t give any of his roommates a lot of time to study the look on his face, though, for he was quick to let his back bump up against the wall and face the other way. Still, although he tried his best to appear strong and tough, it only took Brian, who had glanced up from his book the second the sound of the door being smacked close, mere seconds to realise Roger was on the verge of tears. A sudden wave of pity washed over him, and he put the book aside to focus on his roommate instead.

‘What happened?’ Brian asked softly, but his question was overpowered by the stern voice of Freddie as he chided Roger in what seemed to Brian like the worst possible moment.

‘You should not go out alone in the evenings anymore. I told you I’d come with you,’ Freddie reminded him sharply. For a split second Roger looked like he was going to let down his walls and cry, but he managed to keep himself together and utter a bitchy reply to his partners comment, which undoubtedly had been well-meant but which was the last one anyone would want to hear after just having been harassed by fellow patients on their way to pick up their dose of evening medicines.

‘Yeah, because that’s going to help,’ Roger rolled his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest. ‘They’d beat the both of us up instead of just me.’

‘Did they beat you up?’ Brian asked with big eyes, voice laced with shock and horror. Luckily, Roger was quick to alter his statement and comfort him just a bit.

‘No, not really like that. Just grabbed my shirt and pushed me to my knees and such,’ Roger corrected himself with a shrug, but the tears still sparkling in the corners of his eyes told Brian it definitely affected him more than he was willing to admit; either for the sake of keeping up as much of a tough appearance as he could, or to prevent Freddie from chiding him again for having turned down their offers of going with him. They all knew Roger hated being chaperoned everywhere he went because it made him feel like they did not trust him - as if he would trade his body for drugs the second he would catch someone alone in the hallway. Even though this was a nice additional advantage, preventing Roger from falling into his drug using habits again was not the reason why Freddie didn’t want to have Roger dwell through the building alone after dinner. It wasn’t anything Roger had done, or anything Roger had any influence on, but it was the atmosphere around Queen Mary’s lately that seemed even more hostile than it had been before.

Some new people had joined in the last few weeks - some people who had joined Drew’s gang, and some who had formed their own in an attempt to see who could be the biggest asshole at the entire place. Both groups did not take very kind to people who did not conform to their norms. They seemed to target everyone who was shorter, slighter, more vulnerable, and especially, everyone who stood out for whatever reason imaginable. Brian had already endured a shove into his ribs and a few stinging comments concerning his social awkwardness, but this was not comparable with the way Freddie and Roger literally had to duck and hide whenever Drew and his renewed entourage entered the room. The door of their room, their mailbox, and even their clothes as they came from the laundry room had been clad with slurs, and even Freddie, who usually feared no one, had broken down just the other day after Drew had single-handedly pressed him up against a wall and groped him, all while his friend had been standing around to applaud Drew and taunt Freddie.

Roger seemed to have had similar collisions with both Drew’s and the new gang. He hadn’t been wanting to talk about it, but no one had believed him when he had told them the bruises on his shins were a result of him banging them into the leg of a table during lunchtime, and not some sort of physical violence he had been pulled through. All these recent events made Brian all the more anxious to keep his relationship with John a secret to the outer world. It was not ideal, because he loved John so much he would have preferred to have shouted it off the roofs. But, knowing that patients at this place saw their love as a reason to both mentally and physically torture him, and that many psychiatrists could use it as a reason to detain him at Queen Mary’s, Brian knew it was the best choice for the moment.

‘Who did what?’ John asked Roger in a rare moment of social involvement. Or well, rare… Compared to John’s behaviour the first few weeks of Brian’s stay at Queen Mary’s, he had become a hundredfold more talkative. He was still quiet in public, preferred to give short answers - if at all - if outsiders directed questions or orders at him; but as soon as the door closed on them and they found themselves between just the four roommates, John would no longer shut himself out. On the contrary - he was more involved with Freddie and Roger than Brian ever could have imagined upon first meeting him. John always told him he was the one who had brought them together again, who functioned as the glue that kept the more introverted and the more extroverted people in their dormitory together, but Brian always found that this gave him too much credit. Maybe he had brought a new personality to their room, but it was the beginning of playing music together (‘the band’, as Freddie insisted they should call it) that had really brought them closer and had established a much better, healthier contact between Freddie, Roger, and John. And that was something John should give himself credit for; he was the one who had initiated the project after all when he arranged a guitar for Brian, which had been the start of music, friendship, happiness, and love, even.

‘ _Drew_.’ The name which Roger spat out as if it left a bad taste on his tongue was what brought Brian back to the conversation following Roger’s return to the room. ‘I crossed him on my way to pick up my meds. He’d already gotten his, but he just waited there with his gang of idiots until I had gotten mine. Then Jake stole my pills out of my hands and Drew grabbed the back of my shirt and forced me on the floor. He shook out those pills and said… you know, he said…’ Roger’s voice died out; he seemed too embarrassed to continue his story, and needed some encouragement from the people around him before he could resume himself.

‘What was it, dear?’ Freddie asked his partner, who was still standing in the corner of the room. Freddie gestured for him to come over and sit next to him, but given that Roger hardly dared to look up at his boyfriend while he talked, Brian feared he’d seen this.

‘He said, ‘swallow these like the slut you are’, and practically forced them down my throat,’ Roger concluded his sentence softly, too embarrassed to admit what had happened out loud even though Brian knew for a fact he must realise he was not to blame.

‘Oh, honey…’ Freddie sighed in a mixture of what seemed like compassion and frustration - a frustration that grew with every single day in this increasingly hostile environment.

‘What did he do that for?’ Brian asked indignantly.

‘You know why he did that,’ Freddie said in a strange, low voice as he gestured to a still pouting Roger to come and sit on his lap. Roger obeyed and walked into the direction of Freddie’s bed with his head hanging down, but Brian remained clueless as to why Drew would do this particular thing to Roger. Freddie, however, was more than ready to explain it to him.

‘You know Roger’s gotten a bit of a reputation of being… you know, a bit of a slut. Word got around that he could give great head in exchange for a shot of heroin, hmm?’ Freddie teased Roger, who first looked like he wanted to settle down, but soon changed his mind and lay down with his upper torso over Freddie’s lap. He seemed to be ignoring Freddie’s words, and instead focussed on the hand that slipped underneath his shirt and leisurely started stroking the milky white skin of his back. ‘That’s long gone now, but Drew and those nasty little bitches he surrounds himself with like the coward he is won’t let go of him,’ Freddie continued when it became clear to him that Roger was not in the mood for talking. ‘Of both of us, really, but they tend to get at me for being rather open about my sexuality, and to Roger about his past of prostituting himself for his drug habit.’

‘That’s… It’s cruel. It’s so wrong, and I can’t believe Drew would do that. That _anyone_ would do that,’ Brian said, but it was John who attracted the attention of everybody around him when he spoke.

‘I’ll get him back for that.’

‘What do you mean, love?’ Freddie asked, his hand never ceasing to draw small patterns on the skin below Roger’s shirt.

‘I said I’d get him back. For what they did to Roger tonight,’ John said without skipping a beat.

Freddie and Brian exchanged a bit of a nervous glance, and even Roger lifted up his head and opened his eyes to look at John. None of them seemed to know how to reply to this rather bold and unexpected statement of their roommate. The thing was, if anyone else would have said the same thing, Brian was sure they just could have brushed it off as a poor attempt of bravery experienced in the moment and fuelled by anger or frustration - like when Roger had first burst into their room a few minutes ago claiming he’d punch Drew in the face if he would open his mouth one more time in his presence. Everyone, including Roger himself, knew he would never do it, so there was no need to worry about it either.

John, on the other hand, was a bit trickier. He was never the one to make such bold statements, and they all knew one could trust him on his word. If John said he would do something, he was going to one way or another, which made his roommates fear he might actually already be plotting revenge of some sort on Drew and his clique.

‘I… don’t think that’s a good idea, Deaky,’ Freddie said pensively, which seemed like just about the understatement of the century to Brian.

‘Why?’ John asked sharply. ‘Do you think it’s okay that Drew can just terrorise half the population of Queen Mary’s without having anyone stand up against him?’

‘Of course I don’t,’ Freddie hushed him. ‘But we both know that we’re not exactly a match for someone of Drew’s stature and behaviour.’

‘So that’s why we should just sit back and take it?’

‘No!’ Freddie protested, but this time he wasn’t given any time to elaborate.

‘It does bloody well look like it!’ John gritted. ‘Look, if you want to sit back and watch while someone harasses your partner, that’s your choice. But if someone would treat _my_ Brian like this-’

Brian, although flattered that John would stand up for him, and feeling weak in the knees when his boyfriend referred to him as ‘my Brian’, did not exactly like the direction this conversation was going. ‘John, I don’t think…’ he attempted softly, which allowed Freddie to overpower his voice so easily Brian wondered if anyone had even heard him speak.

‘Are you calling me a lousy boyfriend because I don’t throw both myself and Roger into harm’s way by  getting revenge on Drew?’ Freddie asked. ‘All I would do would be making things worse for Roger if I would go after Drew like some kind of maniac in a useless attempt to make him back off!’

‘Guys, can we please not fight over this? The last thing I can use right now is having my best friends quarrel,’ Roger said in a surprisingly vulnerable voice. He sounded like a toddler asking the Hallmark’s employee to help him search the parent he had lost in the masses of people - which Brian decided wasn’t far from the truth. Roger - and all of them, for that matter - were finding themselves locked up in a mental institution far away from the world they came from, just trying to survive in a hostile environment that seemed to be programmed to break them down rather than rescue them. The only support they had was that which they could give each other, and Roger was more than right in remarking that them fighting was the worst thing they could settle for right now.

‘We’re not fighting, lovie,’ Freddie, who must have realised the same, hushed. ‘Just figuring what to do with Drew. Aren’t we?’ he asked, one eyebrow cocked at John, who stubbornly refused to answer.

‘He’s right. And of course John would never call you a lousy boyfriend,’ Brian said on behalf of John, who luckily nodded slightly in agreement to back up the claim they all knew was right but which John was not in the mood for to admit. ‘I think we’re all just frustrated - I wish there was something we could do other than getting out of Drew’s way to try and protect ourselves.’

‘Maybe we should talk to Nolan sometimes,’ Freddie proposed.

‘We can always give it a try,’ Brian said with a bit of a shrug. He didn’t think it would be too effective to let their mentor in on the problems they were facing with Drew and co; Queen Mary’s could hardly organise its visiting hours, let alone run a successful anti-bullying and violence programme. But when he noticed that John was opening his mouth to probably speak out loud the doubts Brian was having about telling Nolan what Drew had been up to lately, Brian quickly changed this subject as to save all of them of another clash between a hopeful, somewhat naive Freddie, and a more pessimistic and probably more realistic John. ‘But in the meantime, is there anything we could do to make you feel better, Roger?’

‘We could play some music,’ Roger proposed. ‘We still haven’t tackled _Stairway to Heaven_.’

‘Sounds good. Everyone in?’ Brian asked, happy to be given a way out of an eruption of the lingering tension between Freddie and John, who obviously still did not agree on how to handle the situation.

‘And what about Drew, then?’ John asked, not ready to let go of the subject yet. However, one warning glance from Brian was enough for him to drop it, or at least for the given moment. ‘Okay, perhaps later. I’ll go fetch our guitars.’

Brian watched with a smile as John got up to pick up their guitars from the suitcase in which they hid it from view - to protect it from whatever kind of bored pranksters might come into their room - while Freddie, forever stroking the skin of Roger’s back in a belated attempt to soothe him, started warming up his voice.

Brian had found over the course of the last few weeks that playing music together was something that was guaranteed to help them overcome literally ninety percent of all problems. It distracted Roger when his cravings for drugs started taking over. It calmed Freddie down when he was having an especially bad day with his eating disorder. It managed to get John out of his shell on the toughest days of his depression, during which he seemed so far away that it was hard even for Brian to get through to him. And as for Brian - it helped him realise that despite everything he had gone through during his, he had found a sense of home after all. He had found friends - he had found part of himself.

‘Thanks, love,’ Brian said with a dreamy look on his face when John handed him his guitar and hopped onto the bed next to him.

‘Mind if I come and sit next to you?’

‘You’re already here anyway,’ Brian chuckled, before he scooped over to leave a bit more room to John. With a pillow to support the back of his head and John nestling against his side, he started strumming his guitar at a leisure pace as the other couple continued their vocal exercises. It was not exactly a very comfortable position to Brian; his right arm had fairly little space in the small corner between the guitar and John’s bass, and the neck of John’s instrument poked against Brian’s chest more than once. He did not complain, though - not now that John’s small body was pressed against his own, now that everyone was quiet again and the argument seemed far gone, and now that he could finally do what he loved doing most; playing music with a group of people he didn’t know he had missed so much all his life.

It was Roger who eventually led them into the song he had proposed, but upon finding _Stairway to Heaven_ wasn’t made to go well with two voices, they were quick to switch to more harmonious bands. The Beatles came up first, but their simple rhythms and melodies left John and Brian terribly bored. The Who was discarded on account of having played their music too much lately, Bob Dylan because they soon found none of them knew his lyrics particularly well, and although _Sympathy for the Devil_ sounded like a great idea at first, it was tossed aside for the same reason as Dylan.

They eventually found a task for everyone to play in _In the Heat of the Morning_ by David Bowie, and artist John was hardly familiar with (which did not surprise the others when they looked at Bowie’s recent rise to fame compared to the duration of John’s stay at Queen Mary’s). Freddie however demanded they start over every five seconds because he was dissatisfied with his own voice, which made it impossible for Roger to ever join in at the moment he had been told to, for they never made it further into the song than the first three lines. Eventually it was John who set off easier songs they all knew and which did not require complicated vocal skills, and soon they found themselves singing _Last Train to Clarksville_ and an endless loop of the chorus to _Hit the Road Jack_ , changing the pace from normal to quick to slow and trying to sing it in three voices at the same time.

They were getting so messed up in the process of this that they ended up in stitches when three seconds after Freddie had given the starting sign everyone had already fallen quiet, and Brian felt drunk on love and overcome with emotion at the mere sight of John doubling over with laughter. He had never seen his partner looking happy like this, and he wished he could frame this moment and play it back in his memory whenever his depression got him down.

 _Hit the Road Jack_ now abandoned, Freddie tried to teach the group an upbeat Simon and Garfunkel song he could not remember - whether the title was _We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Going_ or _You’ve Got a Groovy Thing Going;_ but none of them minded particularly much; especially not when Roger, frustrated with Freddie failing to teach them the text since he hardly knew it himself, started belting out the chorus of _Daydream Believer_. Freddie protested, but when Brian and even John loudly sang along, he could do nothing but surrender and save his friends from embarrassment when it turned out no one but he himself knew the couplets.

The atmosphere in the room had never been as easy and pleasant as it had been that evening, and Brian was sure they could have continued singing and playing until deep into the night if it hadn’t been for the loud knock on the right side of their room that let them know their musical exertions were not appreciated at that hour of the day.

‘Will you shut the fuck up now? People are trying to sleep here!’ A voice, followed by the sound of a book or an item of similar weight, collapsed against the wall and then fell to the floor with a dull thud. The four of them instantly dropped their activities, more out of surprise than anything else. None of them knew particularly well how to reply to this, but Freddie would not have been Freddie if he had not managed to come up with something instantly.

‘Darling, it’s only half past nine! Is this a senior home or so?’ Freddie called out, and the book (or whatever it was) was tossed against the wall for a second time.

‘It’s a fucking prison, what this is! Now shut the hell up!’

‘Well, that was clear language,’ John eventually broke the silence as he gently put his guitar aside. ‘Maybe we should call it a day. We have to get up early tomorrow after all, so I think I’ll go and brush my teeth and all.’

Without awaiting the reply of anyone, John stood up from the bed with surprising speed, almost seeming enthusiastic about doing so. Brian lifted an eyebrow in his boyfriend’s direction; he knew John was never the one to need a lot of convincing to settle down for the night like Freddie sometimes did when he was in a productive mood, but him being so eager to brush his teeth and wash his face was not something Brian had expected - especially not when he was dragged into it.

‘Come on, Brian, grab your stuff and let’s go,’ John encouraged him, even reached a hand into his boyfriend’s direction as to hurry up the process.

‘We could also just brush our teeth here,’ Brian proposed as he accepted the hand John offered him, but his proposal was swept under the rug.

‘We’d still have to go to the toilet anyway,’ John said, letting go of Brian’s hand and marching into the direction of the door. ‘We’ll see you in a bit, guys,’ John offered the other couple as a means of a temporary goodbye, leaving Brian even more confused than he already had been.

‘Why can’t Freddie and Roger-’ Brian asked on behalf of what seemed to be all three of them, for his friend seemed just as confused by John’s sudden hurry.

‘I mean, if you want to shag Brian in the shower, you can just tell us so,’ Roger said, but John ignored him in favour of answering Brian’s somewhat more appropriate question.

‘We’d better not leave the room and our instruments all unguarded now. Especially not now that our neighbours have gotten themselves into a twist about us playing music after dinnertime.’ With these words, Brian was tugged past the door and dragged into the hallway by John.

Still not knowing what on earth was going on and what the purpose of all this hurry was, Brian opened his mouth to say something, but he didn’t know what. Why hadn’t John wanted the rest of their friends to join them in their evening bathroom rituals? Was it because he suddenly felt the desire to share something personal with him, or was there actually danger in leaving their possessions alone in their room now that Drew’s gang had renewed itself with even more vicious members?

Brian had already heard of someone having ended up at the infirmary with a black eye Drew had given him over closing the door of their room just as he walked by, which Drew had taken offence against. Drugs, spoons and syringes also had been stolen out of rooms according to Roger, but this was a matter that Brian preferred to stay out of as much as possible. Still, would it be true that people broke into each other’s rooms either to trash them or to steal forbidden valuables?

‘Do you think someone could break down the door? Or force the lock to get into our room?’ Brian asked a bit nervously, but John quickly shook his head.

‘Of course not. They wouldn’t be that stupid, and no one in this place has the energy to break down the door of someone who didn’t actively attack them. I just needed to catch you alone for some business I intend to fix right now.’

‘What sort of business?’ Brian asked. Due to John’s unusually quick pace, they now arrived at the end of the hallway, where they pushed open the swing doors and marched towards the stairs. Brian himself remained at the top of the stairs for a second, and he was glad he had lingered there when John answered his question, for he was sure he would have tripped over his own feet if he had found himself on the steps when John answered him.

‘We’re gonna have a little word with Drew.’

Brian felt his heart skipping a beat when he heard those words. Grabbing onto the handrail of the stairs, he repeated: ‘Have a word… with Drew?’ in the hope that he had somehow misunderstood his partner’s intentions. When John nodded affirmatively, Brian was sure that he had not misheard his words, and his mind started spinning to come up with the right way to talk John out of it. ‘John, I’m not too sure if that’s-’

‘No worries. I’ve got this all planned out,’ John said in as calm a voice as Brian had ever heard - as if he was in the supermarket and had just come up with an alternative for the ingredient that was out of stock instead of about to deliberately rub the biggest asshole of the place the wrong way.

John descended the stairs further down, and Brian found himself still clinging to the wooden handrail for stability as he trailed behind him. ‘You know you won’t stand a chance fighting Drew.’

‘I won’t be fighting him. Not physically at any rate,’ John said, continuing to tread downstairs. ‘And if he’s where he’s usually to be found in the evening, there’ll be too much staff and wardens around for him to beat me up anyway.’

The thought that they would not go to some sketchy backroom to be tortured by a well-known psychopath comforted Brian a little bit, but even if Drew would not be in the right place to break all of their limbs, Brian realised he still could injure them to some extent in the blink of an eye. ‘He might still be able to punch you a black eye before a guard can come over.’

John snorted and seemed to quicken his pace down the hallway, as if the prospect of this was an invitation rather than a warning to him. ‘I’ll deal with that if that’s what it takes to get some justice for Roger. It’s about time Drew was taught he can’t mess around without consequences.’

Brian, as if struck by John’s heroical statement, could come up with nothing more to say and simply followed his partner to wherever he was leading him in silence. Sure, he was not exactly excited about the possible prospect of ending up at the infirmary with a dislodged shoulder in a few minutes - but John had a point about it being time that Drew backed off. And if John had a plan as to how to shut Drew up, then who was Brian not to support his partner?

‘Okay then. I’ll be right next to you,’ Brian whispered, which - although spoken a lot softer than the previous objections he had made - managed to make John stop and turn to look at him.

‘I appreciate that,’ John whispered back at him. ‘Don’t be afraid. I’ve got a plan for this. And if it backfires, Drew’ll have to go past me before he can touch you. He won’t be putting his hands on you again in my presence.’

Anyone else listening to these words coming from the slightest, most socially awkward person in existence would have laughed at the attempt at a warning, but Brian realised they held a lot of power. Brian was aware that physically there was not too much John could do against Drew if the guy was hard on hurting him, but John intended on using words that evening. Through he had gone through years of indignant teachers, snappy students, and a psychiatrist who had torn him apart, only a few months of John’s presence had made it clear to him that there was no one who could make someone curl up and die in a matter of two sentences as well as John could.

Whatever John was planning, Drew was in for something he probably wouldn’t forget for a while.

They passed the canteen and the kitchen, and Brian eventually made out that they were heading for the activity room. It was a not too large, square space where a few pool tables, a television, and some board games had been arranged, and in which Brian had never actually placed a foot inside after dinnertime. It was a known fact to all Queen Mary’s patients that Drew’s gang tended to hang out and play poker for cigarettes and drugs in the evenings, and anyone uninvited had better stay away if they didn’t fancy leaving the room with a black eye. The arrival of some new people who enjoyed challenging Drew had made it not only a place for drug trades, but also for fights and near boxing matches whenever staff was not around. Guards were now present every evening, yet still did the two opposing clans, or whatever one wanted to call the miserable pile of Drew and anti-Drew supporters, erupt into violence a handful of times a week with ease.

Entering said room was not a pretty prospect. Brian trusted John in knowing what he was doing, but he could not help feeling his heart beating in his throat when he stepped over the threshold.

It were the guards that noticed their presence first. Ian and someone of whom Brian only knew the rather disrespectful nickname Harelip for the scar he carried across his upper lip trailed their eyes up and down the newcomers. Brian glanced down, but from the corners of his eyes he could see that if anything, the inspection from the guards made John pull up his chin higher as he marched towards the table in the left corner of the room.

It was the usual crew - Drew, accompanied by his personal lapdogs Jake and Leo, was sitting around the table with a few other guys Brian remembered were known to have quite a reputation around the place. Not nearly as bad as Drew, but most of them had at some point or another ended up in isolation for violence or drug use or other undesirable behaviour. No one he liked to be around, no one he would ever go near if it hadn’t been for John bringing him into their direction.

It was Drew himself, eventually, who noticed John and him first, but not before they were standing so close to their gambling table that their presence could not be missed by anyone. Only then did he cast up those ugly, shallow eyes, and smiled an evenly ugly smile into their direction.

‘Looks like that little fag sent some of his friends over.’

Well, that was off to a good start, Brian thought to himself. He felt the palms of his hands starting to grow clammy already, and hoped it didn’t show too much that he felt uncomfortable already. Even the wardens, who had turned around to look at them, seemed to watch the situation carefully. They probably smelled problems coming up the second Drew had spoken those words, but more than a moderately loud ‘language’ they did not do. They probably felt not too comfortable either, which was a thought that did not sit particularly well with Brian.

John, however, seemed to be able to shrug off everything around him with ease. If anything, he seemed to enjoy the opening words Drew had welcomed them with, because they seemed to tie in unexpectedly well with the plan he was now starting to unfold.

‘That’s right,’ John said with a cocky smile that revealed he had come up with a master plan of some kind. ‘We got here to bring you a message from Roger. He’s accepted your offer and will be ready for you at ten tonight. He’s got a bit of a tight schedule, but he’ll be able to squeeze you in just before curfew. Make sure you won’t be late.’

The poker game halted, and multiple people looked between Drew and John for an explanation for this unexpected reservation he came to bring note of.

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Drew asked indignantly. John didn’t budge, even though Brian realised right away that this story was on hundred percent made up.

‘You’re supposed to know that better than I do. I’m just here to schedule the appointment and prices, what you settled for the rest is your business.’

‘Prices for what?’ Jake asked, which made John crack a smile.

‘On whatever Drew and Roger agreed on,’ John shrugged. ‘Some LSD or whatever you’re usually on can get you a handjob or so, but we all know Roger prefers heroin. A shot of heroin will do for an amazing blowjob, I’ve been told. But Drew knows that better than me of course.’

‘What the fuck-’ someone commented from the sideline. The game of poker had now been abandoned entirely; all heads had turned towards John, and to a lesser degree to Brian, who was trying hard to hide his smile as this might undermine John’s credibility - because really, the straight face his boyfriend managed to pull off during this nerve-wrecking yet hilarious scene was admirable.

Ignoring the comment and turning to Drew again, John said: ‘Now, of course we know you’d rather raw him, but he isn’t getting into that sort of business anymore since he’s got Freddie. But on the rest of it he’s still really rather flexible.’

‘What the _hell_ are you talking about?’ Drew was raising his voice by now, obviously not pleased to have someone talk to him like this, and especially not in front of his entourage. However, since his indignance did not stretch further than a few words strung together with various threats and curses, John was given ample opportunity to find himself more monologue to embarrass his enemy with.

‘Look, I know it’s frustrating that you lost your favourite fuck buddy, but I’m sure you’ll find someone new,’ John said in the voice of a mother consoling her teenage daughter who had been dumped by her boyfriend of two months. ‘I mean, didn’t Jake and you have a go at it last week? I heard the entire second floor talk about it.’

‘Jake and I did _what_?’ Drew sent his friend a grimace, one that Jake was quick to copy from him. ‘Where the hell did you hear that?’

‘So it’s true, then?’

The words had left Brian’s mouth before he had really thought them over, and everyone turned to him so quickly that he was not given the chance of regretting them; solely to stand by them when Drew’s reply came.

‘Absolutely not!’

‘Your first reaction was to ask us where we heard it, not to deny it. Psychology proves this heightens the chance of the implication being true,’ Brian recited from a long-forgotten class on social sciences back in high school. Then, before anyone could put him down for being a nerd (which he knew they thought he was), he added: ‘But I don’t suppose you know how to spell psychology, let alone how to apply it practically.’ God, those were words he normally wouldn’t even dare say to his parents, let alone to a certified psychopath if it hadn’t been for John’s presence. Whether it was a good or a bad development was something the jury was still out on, but the fact that John _did_ things to him was a fact for sure.

Whatever it was he had just blabbered out at Drew Brian wasn’t sure of in the heat of the moment - and neither did Drew seem to understand it, for he blinked at him with a dazed expression and then cut right to telling them to shut up in a surprisingly nice manner.

‘Whatever kind of bullshit stories you’ve been hearing or started yourself like the low lifers you are, I never want to hear any of them again,’ Drew said. His voice was firm, but that did not seem to suffice in scaring off John Deacon that day.

‘Or what?’ John merely asked, a taste of irony to his voice.

‘Or I’ll bloody well cut your eyes out,’ Drew said, no irony traceable in his voice. ‘Ask that nerd behind you if you doubt it.’

Well, that was a bit of a touchy subject that still hurt Brian whenever he thought of it - not because his pride had been hurt when Drew had dragged the point of a knife across his upper cheekbone, but because this reminder of it brought up the memory of Jimmy, and that of him losing all last traces of hope of feeling at ease at this place in one swift moment. Still, Brian was determined not to look away, but locked eyes with Drew coldly as he left replying to John.

‘Heh, I can now see why Roger decided to switch you for Freddie. He’s nearly not submissive enough for this sort of dominance by far. Maybe you’ll have better luck with one of your followers,’ John, laying his hand on the arm of Jake. ‘This lapdog over here for example.’

‘Get the fuck off me,’ Jake huffed, pulling away his arm. John’s smile only grew, which told Brian he knew exactly how to react to this. Really, he was proving himself to be not nearly as socially awkward as he was often made out to be.

‘Or what? Will Drew get possessive over you?’

‘Fuck off,’ Jake growled, but his reaction made John’s suggestion that Drew would grow angry out of possessiveness seem dangerously close to the truth.

Drew, likely out of a lack of anything else to say, said to the two intruders: ‘Didn’t know your entire room consisted of a bunch of fags.’ Unluckily for him, even this John seemed to be able to turn around to throw it right back at him.

‘Of course you knew,’ John rolled his eyes. ‘Surely you should remember that orgy you arranged with us a few weeks ago. It was bloody brilliant. We should do that again sometimes.’

This might have been a bit too much on John’s side, for now Drew’s face was turning positively red and he stood up from the table, the chair clattering on the floor behind him. Security watched the situation unfold before their eyes carefully, but did not react, not even when Drew raised his voice to a level where Brian was sure the people in adjacent rooms should be able to overhear him.

‘Shut your fucking mouth!’

‘That’s not what you said last week,’ John ‘reminded’ him, and then seemed to decide he had had enough of teasing the man - or rather perhaps that he should probably not try to stretch his luck any further. Clapping in his hands, he announced: ‘Well, we’d better get to it, then. We’ve got some more business to do. Tonight at ten in Room 43. And if you’re still interested in that threesome for tomorrow afternoon, Jake, just drop me a hint during breakfast tomorrow.’

‘Shut the hell up! We never asked for any of this fag shit!’ Drew yelled. John merely smirked in response; he had himself under control a lot better than Drew had, and it was showing.

‘Neither did we ask for your abuse,’ John said coolly. ‘If you leave us be we’ll leave you be.’

The thought of being offered a peace treaty did not seem to go well with Drew, who was used to being the one who got to decide what happened. He indeed now threw his head back in the fakest laughter Brian had heard in ages, and when he looked them in the eyes again, the man said: ‘One doesn’t simply tell Drew what to do.’

‘ _One_ might not do so indeed,’ John agreed. ‘But I am not just one. I’m here on behalf of the hordes of people around here who have had it with the bullying, violence, and overall asshole behaviour that you use to put yourself on your throne, Johnston,’ he said, singling himself out as the most powerful speaker between the two of them; which one might expect was easy enough with an guy with the intellectual capabilities of a mountain goat, but which in theory was a bit harder to achieve when the mere presence of Drew made most people unable to utter a word. Not John, however; John was speaking to Drew like Brian doubted anyone had ever done before, and he even found the courage and opportunity to add a threat to his statement.

‘But whoever flies high can also fall a long way down. You know what a single rumour could do to your reputation.’

This sentence left the whole bunch looking at each other for five awkward, tensed seconds, before Drew himself eventually dared to pose the question.

‘What are you implying?’

‘Are you literally so dumb I need to spell it out for you?’ John asked. ‘You put people at the bottom of the pecking order for being gay. What if we spread some stories that’ll land you in that position?’

Drew grinned at the mere thought of it, and seemed quite secure such a thing could never happen. ‘You wouldn’t. And even if you did, no one would believe you.’

‘Wouldn’t they?’ John pondered out loud. Then, before continuing, he cocked his head a bit to the side and narrowed his eyes. ‘Why are you so much against gay people anyway? You’re trying to draw a line between them and yourself so much it’s almost as if you’ve got something to hide from us.’

Drew scoffed, but a tiny hint of fear was visible in his eyes - tiny, but it was a breakthrough when it came from someone like him. ‘You’re bullshitting and you know it.’

Disregarding this accusation, John pretended he was thinking very deeply for a moment before he said: ‘What was up with that new gang again? Those people that have been trying to cast you off your throne? Wouldn’t it be a shame if they heard of your… deviant sexual tendencies?’

There was no smile on Drew’s face when he replied now. ‘I’ll _kill_ you.’

Brian was sure even Drew himself knew that he was bluffing, but John sure as hell was not when he threw back at him: ‘Not if they kill you first.’

Sure, they hoped the new patients were not as bad as that - but Brian had already heard some disconcerting stories about their background of drugs and violence, and it was all too clear that even Drew was unsure whether he could trust them not to hurt him or not. The chances of being killed by a fellow patient were slim, but not impossible, as it had happened before according to John’s chronicles of the place.

John, seeming to agree with Brian that this was probably the strongest point into the argument at which they could leave, flashed Drew one more cold yet collected glance. ‘Be careful, Drew. Homosexuality is a disorder, after all. Might get you sent to a long-stay clinic if someone finds out. Look after yourself.’

Well, perhaps they better could have left without those closing words, because it was John’s final speech that triggered Drew into practically shoving the table, along with the plastic cups of water and the games laid out on it, aside to have better access to the person he wished to attack.

Security acted surprisingly fast, but Drew was violent enough to be put in isolation for four days, and John ended up at the infirmary with the biggest black eye Brian had ever seen. He felt incredibly sorry for his partner, but John took it like a man and wore it like a war hero, a physical badge of courage. Whenever in the following days - during which the bruise deepened and changed from purple to blue and green - Brian remarked upon how bad he felt for him, John would just shrug it off and tell him it had been worth pulling a scene on Drew. Better even, when John slipped under the covers with him the second night and Brian kissed his right cheek in order not to brush with his nose against his bruised cheekbone, his boyfriend told him, upon once again being told Brian felt sorry for him:

‘It’s a small price to pay for getting justice for Roger. It’s nothing compared to when Drew cut you with a knife. And what’s more, now you’ll no longer have to be known as ‘the only one who ever challenged Drew’.’

Maybe romance wasn’t John’s strongest point, but he knew damn fucking well how to show Brian that he meant the world to him.

# # #

When the warmth of John’s body disappeared as his boyfriend slipped away from the bed on which they lay cuddled together, Brian’s first response was to reach out to place his hand on whatever part of John he could get hold on in his state of half consciousness. He caught onto what he figured had to be the crook of John’s elbow, and he heard muffled chuckling from him as John softly removed Brian’s fingers with his own and placed his hand back on the mattress.

‘Don’t go…’ Brian mumbled in a sleep-drunk voice, and he felt fingers running through his hair.

‘Shhh. I’ll be right back,’ John said. With that, he got up from the bed and shuffled towards the door, unlocking it and disappearing from the darkness of their room into that of the hallway. It was only then that Brian realised that his partner was probably just going to the toilet, and he would have felt embarrassed by his clinginess if he had been awakened enough to feel anything else besides the urge to go back to sleep. He fought the urge to close his eyes and drift off until John had returned, but he seemed to be taking his sweet time, and Brian tumbled back into unconsciousness again.

He didn’t know how long had passed between John leaving and returning to their room again, but what he did know was that he hadn’t managed to stay awake, for it was John shaking his shoulder that awoke him from his slumber.

‘Hey, Brian, wake up, will you?’ The voice was soft and delicate - enough so to make Brian want to snuggle deeper into his pillow and sleep for the remainder of the night. Speaking of which… how much of the night was left anyway?

‘Time is’t?’ Brian managed sleepily.

‘About six-twenty,’ was the reply that followed. Brian sighed in relief, knowing he’d have about forty minutes left to sleep, and reached out a stray arm into the general direction of his boyfriend’s voice as a half-hearted attempt to get him to lie down with him again.

‘Come back to bed,’ Brian said, voice muffled by the fact that his face was half squished in the pillow.

‘You’re sweet when you’re sleepy.’ Brian could hear the warmth in John’s voice when he said this, but he himself experienced nothing but unpleasant cold when John yanked the duvet off his body.

‘Ugh- John!’ Brian protested, but a hand was clamped over his mouth to prevent him from making any more noise. Now forced to open his eyes, Brian snapped open his eyelids and stared at his boyfriend with a mixture of confusion and slight annoyance, although he detected nothing of the same emotions in John’s expression. If anything, his partner looked amused, slightly endeared even. Brian would have liked to wipe that smile off his face if it hadn’t been for his tiredness, and for the highly confusing reason John gave for him to keep quiet.

‘Shush, don’t wake Freddie and Roger up. Freddie won’t be much of a problem, but Roger might run off with your croissant.’

Croissant? Running off with said croissant? What on earth…

‘What are you talking…’ Brian asked, and followed the direction of the finger John pointed at his nightstand, of which the alarm clock usually present had been removed to make space for a regular grey tray from the canteen. This morning, however, it did not contain a regular disposable cup of coffee and a bowl of porridge or yoghurt with muesli or a likewise substance, but two-dinner-sized plates filled with croissants, toast, ham, cheese, small cups of butter and marmalade, and a pair or hard boiled eggs. Drinks of both coffee and orange juice had been supplied, and John had even made sure to bring cutlery, salt, and enough napkins to last them a lifetime - a lifetime of breakfasts in bed at any rate.

‘Voila,’ John said as he presented the meal to Brian, who was so surprised to see such a sight that he thoroughly rubbed his eyes as to make sure it was not just his imagination running away with him. But even when he had blinked an excessive amount of times in rapid succession, the sight nor the smell of fresh toast disappeared from the nightstand next to the bed.

Still overcome with both sleep and surprise, Brian started: ‘Where did you get…’

‘The kitchen. You didn’t think the staff would eat the same trash they serve us on a regular weekday, right?’ John said, and Brian huffed. He’d never thought of it too much, but there was indeed staff that stayed overnight to keep the peace at Queen Mary’s. He’d always assumed they’d have the same meals the patients were subjected to, as it was, but it didn’t surprise him to learn that staff would have their own little party instead of feasting on plain porridge.

It had already surprised Brian a bit to see that staff would eat in their own rooms instead of in the canteen, where they could keep better watch on everyone, but now he understood - they didn’t want to create a fuss over eating what seemed like caviar and fine wine in comparison to the regular meals. Admitted, on Saturdays, scrambled eggs, bacon, baked beans, and similar breakfast products would be put up to choose from on a first-come-first-serve basis, meaning that usually only the people first in line could enjoy such luxuries - luxuries that faded into nothingness when compared to the fact that staff got to eat them day in day out.

‘That’s… but how did you get into the kitchen? I thought the hallway doors are locked at night.’ Without directly alluding to that rather embarrassing night during which he had found himself pulled away from the barricaded swing doors by John in a state of panic, Brian reminded John of what he thought was common knowledge to everyone. Not so much to John, though.

‘The doors to the grand stairs are closed, yes, and so is the back door. But the door of the fire escape isn’t. I mean, it’s sort of locked. Someone kicked it in in a state of rage about a year ago, and repairing it was too expensive, so they just sort of improvised a lock on it. A lock that, with a bit of practice, you can open very easily with…’ John reached out to the waistband of his pyjama trousers, and unhooked a small piece of black metal from it. ‘A bobby pin. Just like the movies.’

A fucking bobby pin. Brian didn’t know if he had to be surprised any longer at this point. Sure, he knew that security leaked like a sieve, but that a safety door could be opened with a hair clip - the oldest trick in the book - was so terribly sensitive safety-wise that it made Brian wonder if anyone at this place even _tried_ anymore.

Just as Brian was about to praise John for his inventiveness, something came to mind. ‘But isn’t there a fire alarm on that door? Or did whoever decided to mimic Jackie Chan and kick that in as well?’

John smiled at Brian’s use of language. ‘No, he couldn’t quite kick his leg all the way up to the top of the door just yet, so the fire alarm remained intact. But it only takes two little wires to be pulled out of their source to deactivate it.’

‘You learned to sabotage the fire alarm?’ Brian asked, his eyes wide open by now if hey hadn’t been already.

‘I did electronic engineering for a few months before they sent me here, remember? Although I’ve got to admit that it doesn’t take a genius to disconnect a few joints. The only difference is that I make sure to reconnect them again after I’m done, which is something the others don’t.’

Brian wondered how many more people knew this trick of John’s besides his partner, but it was too early in the morning to be bothered by such a matter. Instead of asking, he just buried his face in his hands. ‘If this place ever catches on fire…’

‘At least then this building will go down with us,’ John finished his sentence.

‘But let me get this straight,’ Brian said, moving to prop up his head on one hand. ‘You snuck out of bed, sabotaged the fire alarm, sabotaged a door, turned the kitchen upside down, reinstalled the door and the fire alarm, and got back in here with breakfast?’

‘What can I say? I’ve been wanting to do something special for you for a while now.’ John shrugged sheepishly, but to Brian this was not something to discard with a raising of the shoulders. The fact that John would go out of his way to arrange something for him, for the both of them to enjoy together, meant a lot to Brian. Just thinking about what John had done through to provide this meal for them made Brian feel giddy with adoration, like a lovesick schoolgirl fawning over her high school crush. The only difference was that John was not some sort of out-of-reach crush for him to gape at; he was his actual boyfriend, he was here, sitting right next to him on the mattress, looking at Brian wish a tired but soft and loving smile that made it impossible for Brian to do anything else but properly sit up and motion towards John to come on closer.

‘C’mere,’ he said, stretching out two long, thin arms to envelop John’s upper body when his partner crawled over to the head side of the mattress. John gave a quick glance towards Freddie’s bed, on which the other couple had gathered, but upon finding them both sound- and motionless, he allowed himself to melt into the touch Brian was providing. He still wasn’t the fondest of physical affection when chances were that people were around to witness it, even if those people were their friends. Brian was therefore always careful to only hug and kiss John when no one else was around, and this time had been no different. He allowed John to see this for himself, and smiled fondly when John fully leaning into the cuddle he was offered announced that John was ready and longing to be held.

‘You’re the best, and I love you,’ Brian said after a number of seconds of silence, and he nuzzled at John’s messy bedhead before he let go of his boyfriend when his partner let it shine through that he was rather eager to dig into their breakfast by reaching a rather helpless hand towards it.

‘I knew I could get you awake and up before seven,’ John said, sounding decently proud of himself while half-getting up from the bed to get a grip on the tray.

‘I’d get up in the middle of the night for you,’ Brian told him, but he felt a little about this offer the second it left his lips. Sure, he was prepared to get up for John at midnight, at three o’clock, at six o’clock, stay awake the entire night for him if that was needed to make him feel better - but so far it had always been the other way around. Since that one night when John had found him sobbing at the door to the main stair gate, the man had stayed up for Brian to comfort him, talk to him, cuddle him multiple times when he’d been overcome with anxiety or depressive episodes. Brian, on the other hand, had never been given the opportunity to prove his worth to John in a similar situation. He was starting to feel mixed emotions about this.

On the one hand he was of course glad that John did not seem to find himself into situations where he needed mental support like that, but on the other hand, Brian had started to suspect that he did need help, but just refused to give in to his vulnerability. He wanted nothing more than to be able to help John when he needed it, talk about his problems and insecurities, but he could not do this as long as John kept up the walls he had placed between him and everybody else. Surely, John had put the gates ajar for Brian, but he knew for a fact that the few comments about how he felt lonely and tired at times were only the tip of the iceberg.

John gave Brian a smile at the comment, and sat back on the bed with the tray of food now on his lap. He fiddled a bit between keeping it there, putting it next to him, or putting it in between the pair of them, but eventually decided on the latter option so the both of them had free range of the food he’d brought back from the kitchen. He then handed a plate to Brian, put the remaining one in his own lap, and gave Brian a nod to hint a him that he was allowed to start.

‘After you,’ Brian said. ‘You’re the one who went through all the trouble for this meal.’

‘No, after you. I did this for you, after all,’ John countered. Brian, knowing that they could wait until the coffee would turn cold and the bread stale ere they’d come to a conclusion as to who was to go first, reached out for a croissant and a small cup of strawberry marmalade. John followed and grabbed a piece of toast, a cup of butter, and a few slices of cheese.

‘Metal cutlery. I didn’t even think it existed anymore,’ Brian said, ticking the knife he’d picked up against the plate and hearing a pleasant ring instead of the dull sound their plastic tableware made in the canteen each morning. Those were safety concerns, of course, but after using disposable plastic cutlery for months on end to prevent anyone causing serious injury when ramming the prongs of a fork into each other’s foreheads, Brian sometimes missed the sound of metal cutlery clinking against each other in the dining room.

‘I can’t believe we’re actually doing this. You know, at six-whatever in the morning, in our own bedroom, without anyone knowing,’ Brian said as he went to cut open his croissant.

‘All the more exciting, right?’ John asked.

‘It is exciting, but how will we get rid of the evidence?’ Brian asked when this question suddenly popped up in his mind. John had gone through a long process of getting into- and out of the kitchen this morning, and to get rid of the plates and cutlery and leftovers they’d produced they’d have to go through the same routine all over again.

To his surprise, however, John did not seem as concerned about the matter as he was - in fact, he did not seem concerned in the least. Not looking away from the piece of toast he was buttering, he said: ‘I’ll just dump it in the hallway somewhere.’

‘You’ll dump it in the hallway?’ Brian found himself unable to oppress a nervous giggle when he repeated this nonsensical sounding solution. John, however, seemed to be serious.

‘Sure. It’s the best way to get rid of any evidence here,’ John shrugged.

‘I’m- not sure I understand,’ Brian admitted, his knife still in his hand while looking at John for an explanation, which his boyfriend have him again without looking away from the piece of toast he was now draping slices of cheese over.

‘Why, you know all of those needles we find in the garden, or half-empty bags of drugs in the hallways? People don’t just ‘lose’ them on accident. This is their way of getting rid of them.’

This was something Brian hadn’t considered yet; he’d always thought that people, after their shot of heroin or snort of cocaine or whatever they did were simply too high to clean up after themselves and destroy the evidence, but it actually made sense that they’d simply dump those items in frequently visited places. With over two hundred possible culprits around, and a staff that had enough on their hands just trying to carry out the daily schedule, how big were the chances that one’s drug slip was to be found out from the material evidence of it?

‘So we’ll just… dump this in the hallway or so?’ he asked for clarification.

‘Exactly. Just tonight or so, when everyone’s sleeping, I’ll put it in front of the door to the stairgate. Staff doesn’t even do any research or call out anyone when they find a syringe in the canteen, let alone a tray of food in the corridor. They’ll just shrug it off and get back to trying to keep Drew and his new enemies away from each other, or whatever it is they’re occupied with at the moment.’

Brian nodded carefully, and took a bite out of his croissant. Things had indeed been heating up between Drew’s clan and some new people who’d come in after a transfer from a different mental hospital. Brian hardly knew anything about them, apart from that the leader of the new pack was called Clyde, and that with the poorly done stick-and-poke tattoos he and his followers carried on the back of their hands, they emitted the vibe of a proper gang one would find in prisons rather than in mental hospitals. Then again, at times Queen Mary’s seemed to share a lot of dynamics with detention centres, in the sense that they both detained large quantities of people who did not feel like being there, so perhaps it was not that weird to see clans forming.

The arrival of this new group had marked a significant break of continuation from Drew’s usual practices. Whereas before it had been Drew and his handful of people against literally anyone they could pick on, his attention was now fully concentrated on tackling Clyde’s group, and he had resorted to recruiting whoever was willing to join him in his battle for power over the newcomers. Of course, John, Brian, Freddie, and Roger had kept both parties at a mile’s distance, but Brian had definitely seen that some more vulnerable patients had chosen to get on Drew’s side.

Stronger personalities, such as Joshua and Lester from their depression talk group, had gone beyond picking sides and actually hung out with Drew in the activity room at night. Older enemies of Drew, however, had ‘enlisted’ for Clyde’s group, which made the divide between Drew and Clyde into a real battle of power. The atmosphere was starting to get more and more grim now that both groups seemed to have gathered at least fifteen to twenty members each, and mealtime, visiting hours, and mail delivery moments were getting tenser and tenser. Brian did not like it one bit; he could sense that something bad was going to happen sooner or later, and right now it was just waiting for the bomb to burst.

At the moment, however, he did not feel like bringing up the matter; not now that he was sitting on the bed enjoying breakfast with John, who was happily digging into his toast, which contained so much cheese that it was cheese with toast rather than the other way around. Brian allowed himself to look at his partner for a bit; at the messy hair, the lean fingers between which he held his morning meal, the crumpled pyjama shirt hanging loosely around his frame, the glow of his pale skin under the light emitted by their night light. The shadows the poor glow cast over his face left the left side of his face in half darkness, which in turn made the right side pop out more in comparison.

This also highlighted the black eye John had acquired after his altercation with Drew, which had taken place five days ago from now, and which still made Brian both furious and queasy whenever he thought of how Drew had put his hands on his boyfriend. John acted as if it was nothing, as if it did not hurt mentally and physically. While he managed to cover up the pain remarkably well, Brian was not blind, and could see John wincing whenever he washed his face in the morning, or when Brian pulled him in for a hug. About the mental scar the beating had left behind, Brian could say very little; John had not said anything about it, other than that he did what was necessary to protect Roger’s name and to teach Drew a lesson. Drew had indeed stepped back ever since John had embarrassed him right in front of his followers, but Brian was sure that this victory had come at a price for John, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

In a careful attempt to address the matter in a way that he hoped John would allow, Brian said: ‘Your bruise is starting to fade again, by the looks of it.’

John glanced up at him shortly, before swallowing down the last piece of his toast and reaching out for a mug of coffee on the tray.

‘Good. If one more person sees this and nudges at their neighbour to tell them that I’m _John Deacon, the guy who never says a word but got punched in the face for sassing Drew_ , I might hand out some black eyes myself.’

Brian chuckled at this. ‘You wouldn’t. You’re much too sweet for that.’

‘Am I, though?’ John asked, lowering the cup of coffee and cocking an eyebrow in Brian’s direction.

‘Yes. You like to act all tough, but inside you’re a big softie.’

‘I’m _not_ ,’ John emphasised.

‘Of course you’re not. Local tough 6’4’’ bodybuilder sneaks out of bedroom to fetch romantic candlelit breakfast for his boyfriend in staff kitchen, more at seven at BBC News.’

John spat the sip of coffee he’d just taken out into his mug again and gave a few helpless coughs upon hearing this. Roger frowned and rolled around on his mattress at the sound of it, but remained asleep despite it all, much to both of their relief. Now that they’d made sure neither of their roommates had woken up as a result of John’s reaction to Brian’s comment, John decided it was time to scold Brian for catching him off guard like that.

‘Brian! I can’t drink my fucking coffee like this!’ he reproved his partner, before placing the cup aside on the tray. ‘Not that I can really drink this anyway, it’s cold. Which is a shame, because the coffee from the staff’s kitchen is a lot better than the trash they serve in the canteen.’

‘You go to the staff kitchen to get coffee before?’ Brian asked, though he was in doubt about whether this really should surprise him.

‘Of course I did. I’m not drinking that fake instant coffee they’ve got in the coffee machine if I can help it.’ John pulled a face, and Brian couldn’t help leaning in and pecking his cheek. John grinned and went to pick up a hard boiled egg, which, with the help of a metal spoon, he cracked open and started peeling piece by piece. Brian followed his example; he quite fancied an egg for breakfast, and it gave him an opportunity to ‘casually’ bring up a matter he realised he hadn’t asked so far.

‘What did your psychiatrist say when you walked into his office with this huge black eye, by the way?’ Brian asked John. ‘You must’ve been seeing Leonard multiple times since Drew punched you.’

‘Surprisingly little, actually,’ John said. ‘He’d already heard the story from some co-worker of his. He seemed kind of happy about it.’

Brian frowned. ‘Happy you were punched in the face?’

‘No! No, I meant happy to hear that I went and told Drew the truth,’ John grinned, and then, with a bit of a surprised tone to his voice, added: ‘Leonard said he saw it as part of the series of positive changes in my social behaviour lately, or whatever he called it.’

‘Really?’ Brian asked, pleasantly surprised - if not a bit confused - by hearing this. This was not because he thought his boyfriend was being terribly antisocial or straight up impossible in his interaction with others; the opposite, in fact. He had opened up a lot lately, was more talkative, went outside his room more often, and had even joined the band they’d formed with their roommates (or whatever one wanted to call their musical get-togethers, that was. Freddie was persistent on calling themselves a band, but as long as Roger, in the absence of any drums, had virtually no musical role at the moment, it was hard to call themselves a band. More than that, as long as Freddie kept bringing up the Button Up Club despite having agreed on the name Queen, Brian refused to even acknowledge he was part of their attempts at passing time by playing music). No, John certainly was being more sociable lately; the thing was just that this renewed behaviour was mainly directed towards his own roommates, and that it happened behind closed doors most of the time. Brian failed to see how any of their mentors, psychiatrists, or just anyone of the staff could make up that John had become more open just by observing him in the hallway or when catching him alone during a scheduled meeting.

‘I was surprised, too,’ John admitted with a smile. ‘But he said he sees I’m making more of an effort to go out of my room and such. I think that’s mainly because you and I go to fetch our medicines together all the time, and because we walk each other over to our therapy sessions. He’s seen you there when you hugged me goodbye just the other day.’

‘That’s true,’ Brian agreed, almost having forgotten this instance.

‘Of course the records of the door keepers show that we’ve been going outside with the four of us a lot lately, whenever we went to the garden to play. And Leonard also said that Jasper told him I’ve been more talkative during group therapy in the morning.’

‘I think Jasper forgot to mention that by being more talkative he means you’re more disruptive because the two of us keep talking to each other,’ Brian said, and John snorted.

‘I don’t even think Leonard would have cared if Jasper told him that. He was all too happy with all of these signs he said prove that I’m making progress at last.’

Brian smiled proudly at his partner, but suddenly a little something popped into his mind that might have cost John some of the esteem he’d just earned with his sociable behaviour. ‘But what about those times you skipped sessions recently? Like when I went to the cave to have some quiet time and found you there instead of at your sessions? You never told me what happened as a result of that.’

‘Oh yeah, that’s right,’ John said, putting a spoonful of hard boiled egg into his mouth. ‘Well, I probably didn’t tell you because not too much happened. Of course Leonard wasn’t too happy about it, and told me it was against the rules to skip without a proper reason. But then I told him it had been accidental, that I’d been with you and had lost track on time or whatever, he seemed to lighten up. Even said that he could hardly be angry that I’d missed therapy sessions if it was to be socially engaging with what seemed like such a good friend of mine.’

‘A _good friend_ ,’ Brian repeated with a giggle.

‘This _good friend_ of mine I’ve been kissing and cuddling behind everyone’s back lately. As _good friends_ do these days,’ John joined in. Brian’s grin spread wider; he loved moments like these, when John and he could sit together and talk and poke fun at their surroundings without having to worry about things. Without having to worry about Freddie passing out from malnourishment, without having to fear for finding Roger with a syringe lodged into his arm somewhere in a bathroom stall, without having to think of the hostile atmosphere in the canteen they’d have to go into for a second breakfast later that morning. They could just sit here, giggle at stupid jokes they’d make like a bunch of schoolgirls, and feel safe in each other’s presence.

Overcome with the giddiness of the moment, Brian told John to ‘allow him to be a good friend to him’, and he found their lips locked together a mere second after. The metal spoons and the remains of the hard boiled eggs were left behind on the tray between them, and Brian could swear he’d ended up with the palm of his hand right in the middle of a slice of cold, slick-feeling ham in his attempt to find support to lean in closer into John. The realisation of this somewhat awkward position made him smile against John’s lips, and John responded to this by throwing one arm around Brian’s torso as he latched their lips closer together.

The space between them was so cramped and the gravity pulling them together so strong that Brian was convinced for a moment that they’d pull on through to turn this early morning kiss into their first proper snog, but they both instinctively turned away when they heard footsteps outside of their bedroom. They passed by quickly, and Brian realised that it probably was no more than somebody on their way to the restrooms, but it was enough to keep the two of them apart from each other and resume their breakfast. Brian picked up his discarded spoon and egg again, but John moved on to another piece of toast. They sat in a silence for a few seconds, before Brian latched on to a topic he had not previously considered, but which the mentioning of Leonard had given rise to in his mind.

‘John?’ Brian called out softly.

‘Yes?’

‘Does Leonard know?’

‘About what?’ John asked, but one glance into the eyes of his partner was enough to tell him exactly what Brian was referring to. He then faced down again to turn his attention towards his toast and shook his head. ‘Unless he’s heard it from one of us, he doesn’t know. I haven’t told him.’

‘And... does he know you’re... gay?’ Brian asked.

‘Also no. Does Sarah?’

Brian nodded quietly. ‘I didn’t tell her. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to tell her, but she just… knew. She’d seen us together and had heard me talk of my friendship with you, and she just drew her conclusion from that.’

‘And what did she say about it?’ John asked, sounding a little anxious to hear the answer.

‘She was fine with it, really. Said it was very normal to feel like that towards another man. She wasn’t judgemental at all. She was the one to comfort me, because I didn’t know what to do with my feelings for you back then. She was the one who convinced me not to feel weirded out by it.’

‘That’s… That’s good. Really good,’ John said. ‘And does she know we’re together now?’

‘Yes, I told her that, just the other week. She was very pleased to finally hear some good news from around this place, she said,’ Brian told John with a smile, but John remained remarkably quiet under it all - even for his doing.

‘You’re lucky to have Sarah, then,’ he said, and Brian instantly had a feeling that he knew what was bothering him.

‘I am. But would you say you’re unlucky to have Leonard as your psychiatrist?’

John nodded quietly, and let out a sigh before he talked. ‘I haven’t dared to bring up the matter yet. The matter of… me being gay, basically. Because I know he’s not gonna react well to it.’

‘How do you know?’ Brian asked, putting the by now empty eggshell aside to direct his full attention to his obviously troubled partner.

‘Because of the way he talks about gay people. Of course we don’t talk about it too often, but one day when his previous patient left and I came in, he said he was glad to see me come in and see that… he didn’t really use a very pretty word, as to say.’

‘What did he say?’ Brian asked carefully. ‘You don’t have to repeat it, but just for me to get an impression of Leonard-’

‘That I came in and that that faggot was leaving, because he was afraid he’d catch the virus if he’d have to spend any more time around him,’ John finished his sentence sharply, but he did not dare look up at Brian, who felt a pang of pain at hearing this statement, which was upsetting for a myriad of reasons. It was wrong to use such a derogatory term to describe anyone, to imply that being gay was a virus, a disease one should strive to prevent oneself from catching.

At a loss of something more substantial to say to comfort John, Brian - after a few seconds of quietness - resorted to: ‘I’m sorry to hear he’d say something like that. He had no right.’

Brian was unsure if his words reached John, for the younger man did not look at him or react to him in any way before continuing his side of the conversation.

‘I don’t know if it’s better or worse that I don’t know if he seriously thought being gay is a virus or a disease or whatever, or if he was just joking. He just laughed about himself and closed the door and said something about him being able to cure lots of people from lots of disorders, but that gays didn’t respond to his treatment yet. That he’d have to step up his game, he said, and he… just kind of made this movement of like… I don’t know what to call it. He just sort of slapped his fist into the palm of his hand to indicate he would… slap it out of him, you know?’

Brian nodded to tell John he understood what he was talking about, but his mind was failing to comprehend all he was being told. He knew that not everybody in this place took very kindly to gay people, but hearing that an educated psychiatrist would make such appalling comments really was a next level sort of awful. And the worst thing was that John had to deal with it; that John, who deserved nothing but kindness and understanding, would have to sit face to face with someone making disgusting comments on his sexual orientation on an almost daily basis.

‘That’s disgusting. That’s disgusting behaviour and thoughts, John, really,’ Brian said firmly, and picked up John’s hand between his own. ‘Do you want to tell somebody? Have a chat with Nolan or Jasper or someone we can trust to inform them about Leonard being… an asshole, basically?’

‘No, I don’t. If that comes out, it’ll only spread the word to Leonard and then to others that I’m gay, and that’s the last thing I want to have to deal with. Although…’

‘Although what?’ Brian asked when John cut off his sentence before completing it.

‘Although keeping it from him also doesn’t feel good. You know, I should talk about things that keep me busy, and I don’t. It feels like I’m lying,’ John said.

‘Why? If he’s never asked and you don’t feel comfortable bringing it up, you’re not lying.’

‘Not lying to _him_ , but in general. Sometimes I feel like I’m living a lie.’ John fiddled with the duvet covers they were sitting on, avoiding Brian’s probing eyes now that he was owning up to his feelings concerning his own sexuality.

‘And why do you feel like you’re lying?’ Brian asked, calm and patient as he could muster.

‘Because… because it’s so secret, everything between you and me.’

Brian swallowed for a bit. He knew John was right about all they were up to together being so secretive, but he had always thought that they did this because they both agreed that this would make them feel best, would make them feel safest, happiest, closest. Brian personally was not ready to tell the world about their relationship, but if it was something John felt like he needed to do in order to feel more at peace, he was willing to go over it. ‘Would you want for it to be more public?’

John lifted his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never really told anyone, so I don’t really know if I would feel better if I did. But I do know that I don’t feel comfortable telling anyone here, you know, for… obvious reasons,’ John mumbled, and Brian nodded almost invisibly. He was aware that John (and he himself too, to be honest) hardly knew anyone outside their own dorm room inhabitants, and that the people they did know from their therapy group for example were alright, but not exactly the ones they would confide their secrets to. And with the chance of the news spreading around like wildfire once it came into the hands of the wrong people, telling either staff or patients of Queen Mary’s just wasn’t a very appealing idea to either of them.

‘Well, you could- you could tell someone outside of Queen Mary’s. You could tell your parents? I’m sure they’d support you.’

John seemed less sure however, and his gaze turned cold at the mere mention. ‘I’m not in touch with them anymore.’

Well, that was a bit of a blow to hear for Brian. He knew he should have expected this, or that it at least should not have surprised him, but for some reason it did. He knew John never had anyone come over for visits, never exchanged any letters with people; and while John said it was because he didn’t have the privileges, Brian did not believe this to be the truth, or at least not the whole truth. The point was however that, whether John personally chose to or not, he was not currently on speaking terms with his parents, which seemed painful enough to Brian or anyone to deal with, but especially for someone in John’s situation. John was already finding himself in a hard situation with his depression and antisocial personality disorder; he could very well use all the support he could get, and that of his own family seemed crucial to Brian. Perhaps it was because he himself had such a close bond with his parents despite everything, but he really felt that it would be good to talk with John about his currently apparently non-existent relationship with his parents.

‘When did you last talk to them?’ Brian asked.

‘A little under two years ago. I haven’t spoken to my family since I got here.’

Two years. Almost two years. Brian could hardly grasp the implication of not being in touch with one’s own parents for multiple _years_ in a row, especially not when one found oneself in such a delicate mental situation as John and himself were in at the moment. A hundred thoughts spun through his head - ranging from wondering what caused their fallout to what it would take to get John back in touch with his family - but, given that he could only ask one question at the time and that he was overwhelmed with this new information, the first thing he could ask was a mere ‘really?’

‘I would not make that up just for the hell of it,’ John told him, picking up the cup of coffee and taking a sip of it. He grimaced at the coldness of it, but put it back to his lips anyway, as if to find something to distract himself from Brian’s questions.

Brian, however, had no intentions of letting to of the subject yet. ‘How did that- what happened?’ he asked carefully, trying his hardest to encourage John to tell him the story without seeming too eager to pry into his past, which was something he’d come to notice John was particularly private about.

‘We just didn’t get on anymore, so we broke off contact. But it’s okay. I know it’s better like this,’ he said calmly, but there was something in his voice, a hint of vulnerability, that made Brian unable to believe him.

‘But that doesn’t mean it’s not hard at times, right?’ Brian asked. John just shrugged.

‘It’s not as hard as you might think,’ he said plainly, and Brian saw him chew on his bottom lip. He took it as a sign that John was having a hard time keeping his emotions to himself, and adopted a softer voice for addressing John again.

‘Hey, it’s alright. It’s okay to feel emotional over a breakup with your parents like that.’

‘I’m _not_ emotional,’ John said more strongly than Brian had previously seen him react to any personal questions he’d asked him, which was a little disconcerting. Brian had come to understand over the course of the last months - and especially the last few weeks since they had been together as partners rather than as friends - that John had a hard time admitting certain topics made him feel emotional, let alone how difficult it was to him to actually talk about his feelings. Still, no matter how hard-headed John currently appeared in insisting that having broken off contact with his parents did not hurt him, Brian did not quite believe him.

There was something about the way John chewed on his bottom lip, the clenched jaw, the way he wouldn’t look into his direction, that told Brian he was trying his hardest to keep his feelings to himself. It were moments like these that John needed support most, the moments when he just needed that extra little push to be encouraged to talk about how he felt, and Brian was determined to get him there with careful love and attention.

‘Do you miss them?’ Brian asked in a similarly soft voice as the one he’d been using before.

‘No,’ John said resolutely, but Brian wasn’t quite buying it as of yet. John had this way about him of not giving in to experiencing certain feelings and emotions at first, but with a little encouragement in the right situation he could open up soon enough; he just needed to know that he was allowed to share his feelings and that there was no shame in doing so. A bit of careful persistence usually got him a long way.

‘Because it’s okay to miss people,’ Brian continued. ‘Even if you’ve broken contact with them and gone through rough times with them, you can still miss them for how they used to be. You can break off touch with people and still care about them-’

‘I _don’t_ miss them, okay?’ John said, louder than he had been talking before. ‘I _don’t_ care about my parents and I _don’t_ miss them.’

Brian was left to break off his sentence halfway through, opening his mouth and closing it again. He was unsure of what exactly he should say at this point, unsure if he should even speak at all. After a few seconds he chose to speak up again, but he did not get very far.

‘But John-’

‘Seriously, stop it,’ John said before he could advance any further. ‘I don’t want to talk about it now, understood? Or do I need to repeat it yet again?’ John’s voice was close to a growl by now, and Brian was left to watch helplessly as he saw John physically retreat himself from him. Whereas previously the tray of foods between them had posed no obstacle at all, it now felt as of the item had created a barrier; not so much for the item itself as for the fact that John had turned half around so he was partly facing away from Brian. Even though he tried his best to hide his feelings behind his seemingly emotionless facial expression, for those who knew John, it was all too clear that he was holding himself back behind those slightly narrowed eyes and clenched jaws. They were little signs that spoke books to Brian. It hurt him to see John like this, so torn between speaking up about what was bothering him and keeping up the emotionless aura that usually clung around him.

Though Brian later realised John’s reservation should have been taken as a hint to drop the topic straight away, Brian now felt the need to tell him just that he was there for him. These were the words he knew he would have needed to hear had he been in his boyfriend’s shoes, but to John they turned out to be the last detail to tip him over the edge, the final straw to break the camel’s back.

‘I just want you to know that you can talk to me.’

‘Yes, I know, _Brian,_ ’ John said with an ice cold emphasis on Brian’s name, which already told the man that not much good could follow. ‘I know I can talk to you if I wanted to but the truth is, I really don’t right now. I know I can talk to you but there’s no use if you don’t listen to me, because if you’d _listened_ to me, you would have understood by now that I want you to stop bothering me about my goddamn parents, but you won’t leave me alone, for the love of God!’

Brian was too starstruck at first to react to this sermon John delivered to him; too shocked to do more than sit and blink at the source of consternation and praying that their roommates would not wake up as a result of this outburst. He didn’t even know why he was so surprised in all honesty. Surely he’d seen John snap at Freddie and Roger on a nearly daily basis upon Brian’s admission into Queen Mary’s, and the odd biting comment towards an overly enthusiastic Jasper or an undermotivated door guard had not been strange to him either. Hell, Brian had even witnessed John’s cutting edge encounter with Drew less than a week ago, of which the angry marks around his right eye remained faithful testifiers to this day.

But never had John had a go at _him_ before; he’d never snapped and told Brian off during the time they’d spent at Queen Mary’s together, so Brian was unsure what to do. He tried to remember what other people did when John would shut them up with a little more aggression than necessary,  but could not think of any precedent that would be useful for him to employ in the current situation. Jasper usually told him to keep his cool, but Brian had a feeling that this would only aggravate his partner even more. Roger’s eye rolls did not seem like a good choice to him either, and while cowering away from him like Freddie often did came closest to what his instinct would like to do as of now, his common sense told him that this in the end would not be the best way to deal with the situation. Especially not because at the end of the day, it was his fault.

Unlike Freddie, Roger, or Jasper who nine out of ten times did not deserve being treated with John’s quiet aggressiveness, Brian had worked himself into this position by continuing to try and coax John into talking about his family when John had repeatedly told him he was not in the mood. He had read all the signs wrong, and taken John’s evasiveness about the topic as an encouragement to try and coax him into talking about it anyway, believing that he needed persuasion when in fact he needed acceptance of his privacy. John was not to blame for having a go at him - Brian had nobody else but himself to blame for that.

‘I’m sorry.’

It came out as a mumble, but a sincere one nevertheless. John, who in the meantime had resorted to tearing apart a paper napkin to give himself something to do while Brian had been in contemplation, glanced up from the white shreds to give his partner a glassy-eyed look. It was clear to Brian that he had zoned out during his intermission, and that he needed to repeat what he’d said.

‘I’m sorry. For going on about your family when you clearly didn’t want to talk about it. I shouldn’t have,’ Brian said, hardly more audible this time. He kept his voice low not because he was ashamed to have to admit that he was wrong, or because he didn’t know how to best make his apology. It wasn’t even for the sake of their roommates still sleeping though all the shenanigans going on around them, but because he felt that his apology should be delivered with quiet humbleness.

John continued to look at him with a similarly empty expression on his face as before; his eyes were boring into those of Brian not by their intensity but by the lack thereof. They remained glassy for the handful of seconds during which he stared at Brian, after he eventually looked away again and threw a handful of paper snippets aside. Brian watched as they dwindled to the floor next to the bed, his hope of John speaking up to him and saying something, anything, to him decreasing the more tensed seconds passed between the pair of them. He was in doubt; he could speak up again to repeat that he was sorry, but just a few minutes ago his urge to keep talking had caused John to go into this state of passive aggressiveness, so perhaps it was better to keep his mouth shut for the time being and wait until John was ready to talk, regardless of how awkward it was to just sit there and stare at each other without speaking.

The silence lasted for a minute or so - a minute in which John somewhat frantically victimised yet another paper napkin while trying to avoid Brian’s eyes. He was failing at this, however; although Brian picked up a lukewarm cup of coffee to keep himself busy with in order to give John a bit of space, he could see from the corners of his eyes that John kept glancing at him every so many seconds. More than this, he seemed to get increasingly restless every time he looked up at Brian to find him sitting across from him sipping from his coffee. Brian wondered if he should offer John to go and give him more space, but in the end, he did not get the chance to. John tossed down the new load of ripped shreds of paper and took in a deep breath before speaking up.

‘It’s okay,’ John mumbled in a voice hardly more audible than Brian’s had been moments before.

Brian looked up with the cup of coffee still latched against his lips; he took a careful sip of it and placed the cup down on the tray again. He did this to win a little more time, for he was unsure how to react. Should this be taken as a sign that his apology had been accepted, or did John say this merely to ease the tension between the pair of them? Brian guessed that the latter of the two options was the case; John still looked uneasy, and more than that, a little hurt and betrayed that Brian had crossed his boundaries by pressing him into talking of something he obviously did not want to discuss. Brian, at the risk of being chided for prying into something John might consider his personal business again, uttered a careful: ‘You don’t look like you’re okay.’

‘I am okay. Just… as long as we don’t have to talk about my family. Not right now at any rate. _Please_ ,’ John added the last word rather helplessly, and Brian felt like the worst person in the world for putting his partner in a position where he felt like he had to beg him to please stop talking of something he did not feel like discussing.

‘Of course. Of course we won’t have to talk about it,’ Brian whispered back at him.

‘I’m sorry, it’s just- I’m not really in the mood to talk about it now.’

‘You don’t need to apologise,’ Brian told him. ‘If anyone has to apologise it should be me. I pushed you into talking of something you didn’t want to talk about.’

John, surprisingly, answered him by saying: ‘Well, I can hardly blame you for that.’

Brian frowned at his boyfriend. He needed a second or two to evaluate this comment and the meaning behind it, but he found out soon enough that even the fivefold of this amount of time would not be enough to figure out what John was getting at with his latest remark.

‘What do you mean?’ Brian asked, and John wouldn’t look at him. Rather, he looked at his own fingers, which he had twirled into the bedsheets below as he explained himself.

‘That I can hardly blame you for trying to make me talk about my family. I’m always so secretive about everything, my entire background and all, that it’s probably only normal to try and coax me into opening up. You’re not the only one who’s done it at any rate, and I’m sure you won’t be the last, either.’

Brian felt a pang of guilt ripping through his belly at the thought that so many people had forcibly attempted to make John speak up about his background that it no longer surprised him. To find out that John had resigned himself to this fate was something Brian hated to see; his personal affairs were no one else’s business until he himself decided to share them with whoever he deemed fit to hear about them - and if he chose not to, then so be it.

‘That’s no excuse for me, or anyone else for that matter, to pry on you when you clearly don’t want to talk about it. Besides, I didn’t go on about it for my sake, but for yours,’ Brian said. ‘I know it sounds ridiculous looking back at it, but I wanted you to be able to speak your mind and know that you can tell me anything you want to.’

‘I know I can, Bri. I know I can tell you anything,’ John said with the smallest of a smile. Then, as this smile disappeared; his expression turned serious and confidential. ‘And I will one day, I promise.’

There was something surprisingly open and inviting, yet at the same time extremely ominous about this promise of John’s. On the one hand Brian felt relieved to hear that his misstep of this day had not caused John to want to permanently keep him at an arm’s length when it came to more private matters, but there was something in John’s voice and his eyes that betrayed that there was a world of things Brian did not know about yet, and which one day, when John thought the time was ripe, would be released upon him.

More than this, Brian had a feeling that whatever he was going to be told in the future, was not going to be painting a pretty picture. Of course, most people who ended up at a psychiatric institution did not have a background story consisting of sunshine and rainbows, but for some reason he had a hunch that John’s tale was going to run through deeper waters than that of most of them. Perhaps it was his quietness, the way he had locked himself away and made himself inaccessible to ninety-nine percent of the people around him, the sadness in his eyes, the fact that he was one of the more serious cases Queen Mary was dealing with; it all gave rise to Brian’s idea that John’s story might be a tragic one, an untold tragedy that would hit him like a freight train when it would be released upon him in the end. Something John had just admitted he was planning on doing.

_I know I can tell you anything, and one day I will._

Brian wished he had something sensible to say; something to tell John that it was alright, that he could tell him all he wanted whenever he wanted, that he hoped he was not being plagued by too much trauma of a past Brian had a feeling had not exactly been ideal to John. But, out of fear of either discouraging him to tell him everything out of fear of bothering his partner with it, or accidentally saying something that would put pressure on John to tell him things before he felt ready for it, Brian instead ended up with a somewhat lame: ‘I’ll be right here for you when you need me.’

Luckily, John seemed to appreciate it. ‘Thank you. I know you will. But I’d appreciate it if for now we could… you know…’

‘Drop it?’ Brian said to help out an again uncomfortable looking John.

‘Yeah. Don’t really feel like thinking about the past right now.’

‘Of course. Of course,’ Brian said. Then, in an instant attempt to change the topic, he asked: ‘Do you want anything else to eat? There’s some toast left if you want, or I can pour you some juice…’

‘Not really, thank you,’ John waved away the offer. Brian decided to go along with him and call it a day, as a matter of speaking.

‘Me neither. But it’s been lovely, John. I haven’t had such a good breakfast in ages.’ Brian reached out a hand to put it on John’s, of which the fingers were still tensely clinging to the bedsheets. John allowed Brian to put his hand on his, but did not let go of the sheets and did not show any sign of acknowledgement of the affection Brian was showing him.

‘I’m glad you enjoyed it. I did, too,’ John told him, but his heart did not seem into it. Brian chewed on his bottom lip; he could tell that even though they had agreed to drop the matter of John’s family, his significant other was still deeply submerged in the topic inside his own mind. He needed something to get his mind off of the matter, but there was not too much to do at a quarter to seven in the morning, submerged in half-darkness and in eternal fear of waking up their roommates. Brian did have a bit of an idea, though - perhaps he could get John to lie down with him and cuddle for a bit before the alarm clock would go off. Just lying there together and wordlessly let him know he loved him despite not always being so good at showing him.

In pursuit of this, Brian downed the last of his cold coffee, collected the shreds of paper napkin John hadn’t thrown off the edge of the bed, and started clearing away the tray to make place on the bed again. John still seemed lost in thoughts, but Brian could see him glancing at him carefully when he leant over to put the tray on the floor next to the bed, before he rolled back into a lying position, head on his pillow, and inviting him over.

‘Come over,’ Brian said, tapping on the empty spot on the mattress next to him. ‘Wanna lie down with me for a bit? We’ve got fifteen minutes left or so before the alarm will go off, and I know I can use some cuddles before having to share the bathroom between us and thirty-eight others.’

‘Better make good use of that time,’ John agreed after the grimace he pulled off upon hearing that it would only be fifteen minutes before they’d have to get up and get ready for another day at Queen Mary’s. John crawled over to the place Brian was keeping vacant for him on all fours, and settled down next to him. Just as Brian wanted to pull him down and throw his arms around him, John turned himself around so his back was pressed up against Brian’s chest. Brian felt a bit discouraged by this development, certainly since John was usually the one to initiate chest-to-chest-cuddling, but he figured that this was not the right moment. He knew he should be happy enough John was still willing to lie here with him even after he had pulled him out of his comfort zone so much, so he just let him be, placed his forehead against John’s shoulder blade, and threw an arm around it from behind him. John did not seem to protest any of this; in fact, he leant in closer against Brian, and picked up the hand he’d draped over his side between his own fingers.

Brian took comfort in the quietness of his surroundings for the few minutes it lasted; nuzzling at John’s back while John stroke his fingers. It was a moment of peacefulness that he hadn’t realised he had been in need of so much until it actually happened right now. There had been so much going on lately - Freddie, after having had a good week, had gotten a fallback and refused to eat for an entire day, launching him right back into the infirmary. The stress and guilt of not having been able to prevent his boyfriend’s slip had made Roger grab onto the first injection of heroin he could get his hands on somewhere after curfew that night; a shot that had made him terribly sick, and, with Freddie locked away in the infirmary, it had been up to Brian and John to take care of him as much as they could between sessions and meetings with their psychiatrists. On top of this, there had been an increase in fights, the smuggling of illegal substances, and hostility ever since the arrival of Clyde and his people - and with multiple guards suffering from a burnout, the pressure had risen on the remaining staff to keep the peace. Nevertheless police had been called in on at least two occasions to calm tensions, and the isolation cells in the basement seemed to reach their maximum capacity. Queen Mary’s was in chaos even more than usual, and Brian wished he would never have to get away from this moment. Just lying here with John in his arms, enjoying each other’s company, revelling in love and silence that was nowhere to be found outside the walls of their dormitory, their safe haven in all of the ensuing chaos...

‘I’m sorry for being like this.’

John caught him off-guard by his sudden apology, and Brian had to drag himself back into the present to try and recall what he’d said. _I’m sorry for being like this. Sorry for what?_

‘What? There’s nothing to be sorry for,’ Brian all but blurted out, but John wasn’t buying it.

‘There is. I never tell you anything.’

‘That isn’t true,’ Brian said. ‘We talk all the time.’

‘Yes, about things that happen around here. About music and our hobbies and about you. Your study and family and how you got here and all. But you don’t know about that from my side,’ John said, and Brian soon found that he could not deny this. It was true indeed that through the months they had been here, he had told John quite a bit of his previous life; his school, his social life - as far as he had had one in the depth of his depression - his family dynamics, his previous encounters with mental health care, the case with Dr Sumner, being discarded into Queen Mary’s… All of this he had shared with John, some things in minor and some in major details, but he did not know John’s story at all. Apart from some superficial information about where John had grown up, the high school he’d gone to, the names of some family members, and an anecdote or two about things he used to do with his friends, there was little Brian knew of his past life. He had noticed before that John was more of a listener than a talker, which did not surprise him in the light of John’s disorders and withdrawn personality. But starting today, it all seemed a little off, now that he was thinking of it. John had never eluded to his seemingly troubled past so much before, and the promise of him planning to let Brian in on it one day really made Brian curious to know what was going on behind that often empty stare of his.

‘Well… You know you can tell me if you want to, but you don’t have to,’ Brian said, continuing the line of openness while not pressuring John into anything he might not be ready for.

‘I know. It’s just- as I said, I’ll tell you someday. It’s just a complicated story and all. I need to figure out some things- put it all in a row,’ John said with audible difficulty. ‘For myself more than anybody else, to be honest, if that’s making any sense.’

‘Of course that’s making sense,’ Brian comforted him. ‘You are the one living with your own backstory; you are the one who needs to deal with it, so it’s no more than natural for you to want to find a way to put everything into order before telling anyone else.’

‘I know. It’s just… taking so long. I’ve been trying to put things into order for years, but it’s as if my brain just shuts itself off whenever I think about things too deeply, you know? I can’t think of the past for too long or I’ll just… go numb.’

‘I know. I know the feeling,’ Brian said, the moments of total numbness overcoming him in the depth of his depression coming back to him. ‘And I wish I could help you put things in order. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you to make things easier for you.’

‘You already are. You’re my rock, Brian. It might not seem like it, but I’ve gotten myself sorted out a lot more since I’ve met you than all the time at Queen Mary’s I spent here before,’ John said in a rare moment of affectionate vulnerability. Brian felt his arm, the one he’d draped over John’s side, being pulled up closer, and soon John’s lips pressed against his knuckles in a long but featherlight kiss. Brian was so thrown off and endeared by the unexpected display of affection that it silenced him for a moment, leaving him unable to do anything else apart from tightening his arm around John’s torso. Of course he knew John loved him, and he knew John felt better with him on his side, but never before had his partner told him this directly that his presence had such a positive influence on him, and that it helped him pull himself through quite this much. He was at a loss for words, stuck between telling John he felt the same about him or thanking him for having let him in.

When he eventually did manage to speak, Brian unfortunately found himself saying the most awkward thing he probably could have come up with in the given situation.  ‘I’m glad I’ve been of use to you,’ he blurted out, soon after realising that this sounded more like a salesperson returning a thank-you from a customer they’d just helped finding the shelf of vacuum cleaner bags. ‘Or well- that I’ve been able to help you, you know. That I’ve had a positive effect on you, as to say,’ he tried to wriggle himself out of his own wording. Luckily for him, he could feel John nodding against his chest, and knew he did not have to dwell on about the part of him ‘‘being of use’’ to his partner any longer. ‘You’ve done the same for me, John. You give me stability like no one else has ever done,’ he said, deciding to leave out the little alteration they’d had previously that morning - after all, at the end of the day, this was negligible when compared to those day and nights and times in between of John being there for him. ‘And if there’s anything I can ever do for you, just let me know.’

‘Maybe you could distract me from my own thoughts? This entire… indirect talking of the past isn’t really making me feel better, to be honest,’ John said quietly, and Brian latched on to this opportunity to get his boyfriend out of his probably not too pretty thoughts in a heartbeat.

‘Of course. We can talk of the future instead, perhaps?’ he offered.

‘The future?’ Surprise was audible in John’s voice, and beneath that layer of surprise, a hint of defeat.

‘Yeah, you know, later. What your plans are for when you leave this place. Or are you- are you afraid that after this… You know, they might send you through to a long-stay clinic?’ Brian asked when this option suddenly hit him as something that might be causing John’s reticence. He had been here for a long time, after all, and the two year maximum stay at Queen Mary’s was inching closer and closer for his partner.

‘I mean… It wouldn’t surprise me,’ John shrugged against his chest.

‘They won’t do that,’ Brian said resolutely.

‘How can you be so sure?’ John asked, his voice smaller than before this time.

‘Because your psychiatrist said you were making great progress lately, right? And long-stay clinics are for _serious_ cases. You’re not one of them, John, and everybody knows that.’

‘I’m not a serious case? Then what have I been doing here for almost two years then, when most people get released after six to eighteen months?’

The comment was delivered with a mixture of insecurity and stinging frustration - feelings Brian could understand extremely well. They never really talked of it as John seemed to prefer to shun the topic, but there was indeed a possibility that before too long he would be removed from Queen Mary’s - either to be set free into the outer world again, or to relocate him to a _real_ psychiatric institution. A closed ward, with around the clock surveillance and isolation cells as a standard, personal dormitory. The thought of having his dearest John being descended in a hell gate like that made Brian physically sick, and he was quick to push the thought out of his head. This would not happen to John; he was way too good for a place like that. Way too _sane_. Way too _sensitive_ , regardless of how he wanted to appear to the outer world.

‘Because they want to prepare you as best as they can to return you to society again. Honey, they won’t lock you up in a long-stay clinic. You’ve never caused any troubles here apart from missing some therapy sessions - and that’s no reason at all. And if they even attempt to do so, a reassessment would prove right away that you don’t belong there, and that it’s about time they put you free,’ Brian said, feeling confidence in the matter rising as he summed up the reasons why John would never end up in a place like this. Besides, if Drew isn’t being sent to a long-stay clinic or a more heavily guarded place, then why the hell would they send over one of their best behaved patients?’

John was silent, and eventually sighed deeply before admitting: ‘I’m just afraid, okay?’

Brian hated to hear this, but was determined to keep strong for his partner’s sake. ‘I know you are, but you don’t have to be. You’ll be out of here and the entire mental health clinic circuit before you know it. And you’ll have your whole future ahead of you. So much freedom to do whatever you want,’ he whispered, nuzzling closer at the crook between John’s neck and shoulder.

‘I… I guess so,’ John answered blankly.

‘You’ll be able to do whatever you want to do again. I’m sure you’ve thought of what you’re going to do with all that freedom at times?’ Brian asked his partner.

‘Sure,’ John said through pursed lips, something Brian did not see now that John was facing the other way. Brian wriggled his other arm underneath John’s torso so he could pull him in closer, laying his head on John’s shoulder.

‘So what are you planning on doing?’ Brian asked hopefully. He hoped that talking of all that lay ahead of John, now that they had dealt with the fear of being sent off to a long-stay institute, would be something John would be far more willing to talk of than all that already happened.

John, however, stayed true to his reticence and answered him with: ‘You can go first.’

‘Oh. Okay, well…’ Brian took a moment to reflect on what it was he wanted when he would be released from Queen Mary’s. Whereas upon first being admitted into the place, he had been afraid he indeed would not see the end of either this place or the next psychiatric institution, he was slowly gaining hope that he would be admitted back into society again before all too long. He had been given the right to telephone, exchange letters, and have visitors from outside the walls of Queen Mary’s, and both Sarah, Jasper, and Nolan had been positive about his improvement. And indeed - if people like Drew and Clyde and their followers were being kept here with the prospect of being released, then why would he not be let go of eventually?

‘So the first thing I’d do when I get out of here would be going to visit my family and friends. I’ve really missed them a lot overtime, and exchanging letters isn’t the same as getting to see them,’ Brian started off. ‘I’d probably first go live with my parent again to establish some stability, and then get an apartment with some roommates or so, like I did before I got here. And go back to school of course! I completed my bachelor before I got here, and was working on my second year of my master. Now I’m not too sure if all I did there still stands - I think my first master year does, but I might have to redo the courses of the second year,’ Brian pondered out loud. ‘I mean, that’s not too bad, right? I wouldn’t even mind doing those over. I did them before and passed them, so it shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe it’ll be a nice way to slowly start building up school again, right?’

‘I suppose it would be,’ John commented.

‘But yes, going back to university would be my first priority. I really miss all the people and the research we did. Or just… studying together in the library. Being here really has shown me what a privilege it is to be able to just get up and head off to school every day, and work on your degree and your future.’

When Brian remained silent for a few seconds after his speech on what he planned to do after his release, John took it as his opportunity - duty, rather - to react to him. ‘It’s good to see you so passionate about your study,’ he said a little stiffly.

‘Well, passionate…’ Brian said. ‘I’m afraid that I’ll be less enthusiastic about astrophysics once I’m knees deep into research papers and exams, but I’ll have this place to motivate me. I never want to fall back this deeply again.’

‘Me neither,’ John agreed with a sigh - which seemed to Brian a good moment to hand over the metaphorical microphone to his boyfriend.

‘So what do you want to do, then, when you get out of here?’

‘I’m not too sure yet. Probably also get an apartment or go to college or so,’ John said, a shrug tangible against Brian’s chest, before he said something that sent a whirlwind of butterflies fluttering inside Brian’s stomach. ‘All I know for when I’ll be released is that I want to be with _you_.’

Coming once again to the conclusion that John really, really was the best thing that ever could have happened to him, especially at a doomed place like Queen Mary’s, Brian spun his boyfriend around to have him face his direction. He took John’s face delicately between his hands, and pressed his lips against John’s as delicately as John had previously done with his lips against Brian’s hand. The entire discussion about past and present and future was long forgotten when John leant in to accept the kiss with gratitude and enthusiasm.

The alarm clock going off was not so much a sign to put an involuntary end to their moment of physical intimacy, but instead it was rather an encouragement to deepen the kiss and forget the world around them. Forget about their problems, discard issues of past and future, ignore the pillow which a sleepy, disgruntled, but at the same time endeared Roger threw at the pair of them. Brian broke the kiss and embrace shortly to give their roommates the instruction to sign off their names for the breakfast role calling, and to tell them they’d be right in time for group therapy, before his arms were around John’s torso again and his lips on those of his partner, living in the only present that mattered to them.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That was it for this time! I hope you enjoyed reading this, and that you’re up for the next update, in which we’ll dive deeper into some of John’s problems and in which Nolan will have some big news for our boys… Please let me know what you thought of this chapter, or if you have any questions or comments or suggestions, I always love hearing them!


	14. Chapter Fourteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello naughty children it's Clinic Time >:D
> 
> I've been away for a little while to work woth @Ronniesshoes on our project The Dungeon, but here I am with a new chapter of The Clinic! This one contains uite a few breakthroughs, some for the better, and some not so much... I'm not giving anything away yet though, you'll find out quickly enough by reading!
> 
> If you enjoyed reading this, please consider leaving kudos or leaving feedback, which I'm always dying for! :D

‘No, that's not what I said.'

‘That is exactly what you said!'

Brian was positive that at least a few heads turned around at the discussion Freddie and Roger had landed themselves into. Normally he would feel awkward to attract the attention of other people during lunchtime, but he was a bit too starstruck by the sheer stupidity of the topic they were arguing about this afternoon to really pay attention to the annoyed glances in their direction. All he could do was sit and stare at his friends with a jaw he hoped hadn't dropped to the floor since Freddie had brought up their latest disagreement.

‘John, Brian, help me,' Roger all but pleaded. ‘Tell him he's an idiot.'

‘How is that news?' John asked between two bites of his sandwich. It earned him an indignant squeal from Freddie, which in turn seemed to invite somebody at the table behind them to turn around and snarl at him that he should ‘‘shut his nasty fag mouth''. John ignored the both of them as he admitted: ‘To be honest I zoned out. What exactly is it you're arguing over this time?'

Roger wasted no time in answering this question. ‘Yesterday afternoon when Brian and you were out for psychiatry sessions - or that's what you told us at any rate,' he grinned, and John rolled his eyes at him, ‘Freddie tried to convince me that all girls shave their arm hair!'

This statement made John lower the sandwich of which he was just about to take a bite, and raise an inquisitive eyebrow at Freddie. ‘You really think that?'

‘It completely normal!' Freddie said. ‘Women also shave their leg hair, right?'

‘What does that have to do with anything?' John asked, still seeming to try to wrap his head around Freddie's ideas concerning female hygiene rituals - or whatever one wanted to call these supposed arm hair shaving habits.

‘Well, if you shave your leg hair, you might as well shave your arm hair, right? That's what women do,' Freddie shrugged.

Roger performed the most dramatic eye roll Brian had seen in a long time. ‘What sort of comparison is that? I brush my teeth, does that automatically mean I also brush my earholes?'

‘No, but perhaps you should. Maybe you'll listen to me for once if you clear out your ears,' Freddie said with a rare but genuine grin on his face - one that Brian was glad to see, but which Roger ignored as he set out to tear apart Freddie's line of reasoning.

‘Just admit that you were in the wrong, okay? Girls shave their arms just as often as guys do, which is _never_ ,' Roger argued. ‘Why would they even want to do that? It'll grow back and they'll get stubbles on their arms. How on earth is that supposed to either look or feel good? It'll chafe against the fabric of their shirts-' 

‘Okay, alright, point taken!' Freddie threw his arms up in the air as a gesture of innocence. ‘But what do you expect me to know about girls? I'm gay!'

‘Fred, you might be gay, but that doesn't excuse you from not knowing how things like human skin and hair removal work,' John reproved him.

‘And you might not have a girlfriend, but you do have a sister and a mother,' Roger added.

‘Yes, that's the entire point! My sister shaves her arm hair.'

‘Your sister does _what_?' John asked, continuing his somewhat rare engagement in a discussion Freddie and Roger had set out. Usually he would not bother to try and keep up with all the nonsense that escaped their lips, but he seemed in a good mood today. He had been in a good mood for a while, actually; for the last handful of days, John had been more talkative with his roommates, more sociable during group therapy, and had been not just the one to join his friends in activities, but also the one to initiate practicing music, playing games, and going around the place to find some amusement in the library or in the gardens. It had earned him a handful of confused glances when he voluntarily showed up to the activity room, and some praise from counsellors and other staff members who had seen him do so. Not that any of this was important to him - he simply seemed to be enjoying himself being out with his friends, and it meant the world to Brian to see his boyfriend crawling out of his shell towards more people than just towards him.

‘She shaves her arm hair! Kashie shaves her arm hair, I'm sure of it. I've seen her do it.'

‘Are you sure you don't mean her armpits?' Brian brought in.

‘Darling, I know the difference between an arm and an armpit,' Freddie said.

‘Well, you also suggested Roger should brush his earholes. I don't trust your knowledge of human anatomy anymore at this point,' John told him.

‘And you also seem to think you can survive on a lunch of two slices of tomato. Open up,' Roger said, taking the opportunity of Freddie's mouth still slightly opened in indignance towards John's comment to shove part of his sandwich inside of it.

‘Hm! Rowger!' Freddie managed between a mouthful of bread, but Roger didn't budge.

‘Take a bite. Come on, do it,' he said, and Freddie reluctantly did as he was told. He tore off part of the sandwich with his teeth and pulled his head as far away from Roger's vicinity as he could, covering up his mouth with his hand to prevent the food from falling out.

‘Very good. Now chew it,' Roger demanded, and with the threat of being given another bite, Freddie involuntarily and cautiously started chewing. He looked uncomfortable doing so, and the taste of the food Roger had just forced inside his mouth did not seem to make things any better for him.

Pulling off a grimace, Freddie asked his partner: ‘What on earth is this?'

‘Peanut butter jam sandwich. And don't you dare spit it out,' Roger warned him when he saw Freddie reaching for a paper napkin next to his plate, ‘or I'll rub peanut butter all over your deodorant stick.'

‘What sort of threat is that?' John snorted.

‘One that'll hopefully make him eat,' Roger said. Ridiculous as it was, the threat did seem to work; Freddie - although making it very clear he was not pleased with the demand of his partner, opened and clenched his jaws around the food, and eventually swallowed it with a look of disgust on his face all the while.

‘Now, that wasn't so bad, was it?' Roger asked when Freddie had swallowed down the last remains of the food, and Freddie looked at him as if he could see water burning right in front of him.

‘Terrible. I can't believe you'd eat something like that. So much fat and calories.'

‘You know he's not particularly careful about what he puts inside his body. Peanut butter jam sandwiches, coffee with sugar that's more like sugar with coffee, a shot of heroin here and there…' Brian enumerated in a whim of wittiness that didn't usually typify his character, but which for some reason seemed to fit the teasing air of the conversation in which they were currently finding themselves. Before he could think better of it and before Roger could protest against this accusation, John made an addition that completely wiped out the severity of all Brian had just said.

‘Freddie's dick…' John said languidly, not giving a single sign of understanding when various forms of protest from either of the two who were concerned came down on him.

‘John Deacon!' Freddie called out. ‘I'll have you know I wash down there every day!'

‘With your understanding of human anatomy, that isn't much of a comfort,' John teased. ‘Down where? Under your armpits?'

A slice of tomato was flung into his direction, but John dodged it just in time. Whereas he at first grinned in victory at Freddie, his face contracted when Freddie clamped a hand over his mouth and turned to Roger. It took a split second for Brian to realise what their concerns were - facing Freddie, he could not see where the slice of tomato had flown off to, but given that John had missed it by ducking down, it was very much possible that it had ended up on the person sitting behind them.

Even though he knew he shouldn't if he didn't want to draw more attention to them as the culprits of the flying piece of vegetable, Brian half turned around in a whim, and copied Freddie in clamping a hand in front of his mouth when he caught just the last sight of the red slice before it fell down from the shirt to which it had stuck at first, disappearing behind the backrest of the chair but leaving an unmistakable wet imprint behind on the shoulder blade area of the shirt of the victim.

Brian was able to turn around just when said victim reached his right arm around and felt at the damp spot, and judging by the sound of the legs of a chair, he was in the act of standing up and probably turn towards them to ask for an explanation on the mysterious wetness on the back of his shirt. Brian couldn't help biting down the back of his own hand in an attempt to keep himself quiet. His previous feelings of comfort towards the light-hearted teasing instantly vanished as snow on a hot summer day, only to make place for a nervousness that coiled up from the pit of his stomach. A few more chairs were shoved back, and inside his head, Brian could already picture how one of the guys sitting behind them would be over at their table in the next couple of seconds to drag one of them up from their chair and not so kindly ask them what the fuck they thought they were doing.

He had to act fast, and decided that he would step up and take the blame. Freddie might actually collapse if someone would do as much as touch his emaciated frame, Roger was still unstable from his last heroin slip, and the last thing he wanted was to have another black eye adorn his partner's face just now that the previous one had faded away. He was going to take the blame, regardless of whose fault the tomato throwing had been. All he would have to do was get up, face whoever it was whose eyes would be boring into his, and say that it was all one big mistake, that they'd just been teasing each other and never had meant for any bystanders to get involved. Taking a deep breath, Brian ignored the somewhat worried and confused glances of his roommates as he hoisted himself up from his chair, and turned around to stand eye in eye with-

-that same wet spot on the back of a fellow patient's shirt that he had been assuming would be the reason for which the bearer of it would by now have slapped him across the face, or at least given him a shove in the chest. Instead, neither their victim nor any of his friends were even looking into their direction. Although the group of five had all stood up, they were not paying any attention to the inhabitants of Room 41; they seemed to be looking at some spot further down the canteen.

‘Guess we got away with that,' Roger grinned. Freddie pretended to wipe the sweat from his brow, but Brian could not join his friends in their relief, and John could tell so.

‘What's going on, love?' he asked his partner. When Brian didn't reply immediately, he got up from his chair and turned towards the place on which Brian was focussed.

‘Not sure. People are looking at something, but I don't know-'

Just when Brian was about to say that he had no clue what had caught the interest of so many people at once, a loud, barking yell from an indistinct source filled the canteen, and in turn quieted the conversations that had been going on. In the few seconds of silence that ensued, chairs were moved and heads turned around; people looked at each other, but no one seemed to understand particularly well what - or rather who - the cause of the noise had been. Brian attempted to open his mouth again, but another, this time lower but louder yell overpowered both him and the people around him, and he frowned deeply upon hearing this. One yell could mean someone had fallen backwards off of their chair, or that they wanted to ward off a predatory bully or so; but hearing two screams so distinct from each other signified more serious problems.

‘What's this all about?' John pondered out loud, trying to reach onto his tiptoes in a rare moment of social involvement while the yelling of now multiple distinct voices continued.

‘A fight, it seems,' said Brian, who - thanks to his height - was able to catch just a glimpse of the multitude of people that had gotten up and carefully moved towards the source of the consternation in front of them.

‘Of course. It's been what, five days? It was about time for a food fight again,' Roger said. Brian, however, was not able to smile at this as Freddie did.

‘No, a serious fight, it seems.'

‘Define ‘‘serious'',  if you will?' Freddie asked, but in the end, Brian didn't have to. The deafening sound of what sounded like a brick wall coming down but which turned out to be a table for eight forcibly being canted and, in the act of it, having all of its cups and plates and cutlery fall on the tiled floor beneath, momentarily quieted down even the screams of those who had been going at each other.

‘Fuck, what on earth?!' Freddie yelped as he all but jumped off his chair at the sound of glass and china shattering. He was among the last people in the canteen to get up from his chair, Brian realised, when he quickly scanned the room. Almost everybody around them had gotten up - some to get closer and watch the scene, and others, more wisely in his own humble opinion, to take a few steps back. Even though the upheaval was taking place at quite literally the other side of the canteen, the room wasn't too big, and Brian highly doubted anyone was in the mood to catch one of those plates flying around.

‘Drew and Clyde,' a familiar voice said, and Brian turned to the other side to see that it was Sebastian, one of the men from their group therapy sessions. ‘There's been tension these days, and now Clyde pulled Drew's chair away from him just as he was about to sit down. It's all getting out of hand, so you'd better-‘ the sound of a string of profanities in the distance momentarily cut him off - ‘better stay away from there'. Sebastian nodded towards the place of the chaos, after which he self-contradictorily slipped past them and seemed to be heading right for the spot he had just warned the group for not to go to.

Brian's first instinct was to ask him where he was going and what he thought he was doing, but he was too late. Sebastian had already disappeared into the crowd of people forming a human barrier between their side of the canteen and the one in which Drew and Clyde, and - judging by the voices and action going on, also their followers - were having a go at each other. Besides, even if he would have been able to speak what had been on his mind before Sebastian had taken leave of them, Brian doubted he would have been able to hear him. The entire canteen seemed to be in the middle of erupting into noise even louder than that which the clashing clans were producing, with most of the people present screaming either for the two groups to stop, for security to do something about them, or yell at each other to get out of the area and find wardens or mentors or psychiatrists or anyone who belonged to Queen Mary's staff, really, to put an end to the battlefield. Because that was what it was at this point, really. The epicentre of the fight was a tangle of arms and legs, some belonging to patients and others to staff members, with rows of both supporters and opponents to the violence trying to be heard. The periphery of the room was not much better. Some people were running, others screaming, others lifelessly staring at the chaos unfolding in front of them. Brian rather belonged to the latter group; it was only when John got into action that he did, too.

‘Come on, guys.' A tug on his arm made Brian look away from what he thought was Drew smashing a dining plate on the head of someone he assumed belonged to Clyde's tribe. The victim of the act screamed bloody murder, and Brian felt sick to the stomach. ‘It's time to get out of here.'

Even though he nodded and sincerely wanted to leave the room behind, Brian couldn't avert his eyes from the battle. It was one of the worst fights he'd seen at Queen Mary's so far, if not the worst - never before had one lunchtime disagreement shaken up so many people all at once and unleashed this much mayhem. Sure, he'd been a witness of people stabbing each other with forks or throwing plates at the other, plus all the drama that ensued, but entire tables being thrown upside down and fist fights with the wardens were a first for him. Queen Mary's was in shambles, and he had never seen clearer proof of it than this exact afternoon.

‘Yes, let's leave right away,' Freddie immediately latched on to John's half-statement half-order, and spun on his heel in what seemed like an attempt to make his way right over to the exit of the canteen. Roger caught his impossibly thin wrist before he could get very fast, though.

‘Not so fast,' said Roger, who pulled Freddie back with seemingly absolutely no effort. ‘I know what you're trying to do here, but you're not gonna escape lunch. Apple or tomato?' he asked with a nod towards the two half-eaten food item on Freddie's plate.

‘Roger!' Freddie mewled indignantly, trying unsuccessfully to pull himself away from Roger's grip. ‘Two hundred men are fighting, we could get killed here, and you're worried about lunch?'

‘Yes, because chances of you dying from a lack of food are greater than you dying because some dumb people are causing a scene in the canteen. Now, apple or tomato?'

Freddie kept his lips pursed in silent disagreement, to which John, who was more than ready to leave, rolled his eyes and stepped closer to the table. He reached out to collect all that was left on their plates - Roger's peanut butter and jam sandwich, Brian's slice of bread, his own buttered toast, and the apple and tomato slices Freddie had toyed around with rather than eaten of - on his own plate, which he, without a word of warning or explanation, took with him as he left the table. His roommates were left to nervously exchange glances between the three of them until John halted his movements and turned around to face them, plate still in his hands.

‘Well, are you coming? I thought the general consensus was that we were going to leave,' he reminded them as if it was the most normal thing in the world to leave the canteen with their lunch remains piled up on one big heap on a plate.

‘Er, you're not gonna get past the canteen doors like that, mate,' Roger reminded him. John just rolled his eyes.

‘If in the midst of this chaos their main concern is that no one leaves the canteen with an unfinished sandwich and half an apple, I'll tell them they haven't got their priorities straight.' With that, he turned on his heel and made a point of marching into the direction of the doors, leaving his roommates no other choice but to follow him.

They got towards the exit without too much trouble - that was, if one did not count the approximately fifty other people who were simultaneously trying to slip past the single door granting access to a hopefully less turbulent hallway. A nervous-looking lunch lady and Jasper, obviously stressing but pretending to have everything under control, kept the gates and ushered everybody out with some comforting words Brian doubted they believed themselves. The queue was moving quickly yet not fast enough for the liking of Brian, who continuously peered over his shoulder and got increasingly anxious when he saw that the fight had not been broken up yet. In fact, if anything, it seemed to be getting worse, judging by the ever-loudening noise and the occasional smashing of tableware and cutlery. The squeeze of his hand which Freddie gave him was well-meant, but did little to comfort him now that all that he wanted was to get away from the mayhem.

To add to his frustration, what Roger had predicted came true; John was halted by the woman in kitchen uniform, who pointed down at the plate he was carrying.

‘You should know that it's not allowed to bring food outside the canteen, young man,' she lectured him in a somewhat condescending voice. Brian chewed on his bottom lip and was about to tell John to leave it, to just hand over the plate and get the hell out of there, to come back later to fetch Freddie something to eat. However, John would not have been John if he would have given in to Queen Mary's bureaucratic policy in an exceptional situation like this right away.

‘It's for my friend,' John said calmly. ‘He's got an eating disorder and is on the verge of passing out due to a lack of nutrition. Surely you don't want to be responsible for that?'

The woman opened her mouth and closed it again. Her eyes narrowed a little; Brian could tell that she knew John was right, but that she hated readjusting the rules she had just set out for them. It was clear by John's unfazed expression that he was not going to give in either. It was Jasper who eventually saved the day for both parties when the line behind them began to ponder out loud what was taking so long and demanding they'd hurry up.

‘You're right, John. Very responsible of you to look after Freddie.' With that, and a tap on the back as a form of wordless praise, they were excused. Brian nearly ran out of the canteen. It was only when they found themselves climbing upstairs to the first floor that Brian felt himself calming down slightly; his mind was still boggling with all he had just witnessed, but at least his heart rate was going down to a more normal pace again.

‘Are you alright?' John asked him softly when they pushed open the door to their ward.

‘Yeah,' Brian said somewhat absent-mindedly. He knew all of his roommates were staring at him - even though he had tried his best to hide it, it was all too obvious that he was upset by the fight in the canteen. ‘I just- just wanna go to our room and leave all of this shit behind,' he mumbled.

Brian felt a wave of relief flowing over him when twenty seconds later they halted in front of their dormitory, which to him suddenly felt like a holy citadel. The sound of the key being pushed into the lock and opening the door had never sounded so good before, and neither had the feeling of being able to let himself fall back into his creaky single bed. As if he could sense his stress, Roger made a deal of double locking the door to their room to make sure none of the violence from the canteen could enter their safe space, after which he got down on the bed next to Freddie.

‘Well,' Roger eventually broke the silence that lingered between them, as nobody really seemed to know what to say after having witnessed such deliberate chaos and violence mere moments ago. ‘That was enough bullshit for today for my liking.'

‘This was absolutely ridiculous,' Freddie said sharply. ‘Who on earth do Drew and Clyde and all those other twats think they are? I've lost count on how often they've had a go at each other since Clyde's arrival. What the hell is their problem?'

‘Need to show who's boss,' John sighed. ‘Competitive masculinity. They only feel self-worth and confidence when they're on top of the chain, and have made sure everyone knows they are. It's something males of almost every species do, but for some reason it always has to get out of hand with human beings.'

Freddie looked at him with a look of emptiness - he probably hadn't expected an explanation bordering on scientific anthropology for the behaviour of some of the most difficult cases at the clinic. Unable of - or not feeling like - coming up with something of the same calibre, he said: ‘What I meant was that things are getting out of hand here at Queen Mary's. I can't be the only one who's noticed an increase in these sort of… well, I'd call it incidents, but that would imply that they're extraordinary situations. As of lately this clan war has started to become part of the daily routine.'

His roommates nodded in agreement. None of them felt like summing up all those evenings during which the activity room had to be escorted because Drew's and Clyde's opposing parties had gotten into rows, or the endless harassment and physical violence towards people of the other side as well as innocent bystanders who just wanted to get the hell out of wherever they were at that given moment. The atmosphere throughout the entire institution was tenser than ever, and it was seeping into every aspect of the day and environment. Staff was tensed, everyone was always on high alert when walking around the place, and the fights formed a big part of the general conversation, both between patients in their spare time and during therapy sessions. Just yesterday Jasper and the day before Jasper had spoken out about it during morning group therapy. It was common knowledge that multiple people from their group had chosen sides or made up and active part of the entourage of the clans - with Joshua and Lester siding with Drew, and Paul and Eli having chosen to support Clyde. Unfortunately, Jasper's attempt to make people aware of the dangers of these clans had been anything but successful; his lack of knowledge of group dynamics had shown when he had given nearly childish examples of how people would bully each other (such as ‘you’re dumb’; ‘I don’t like you’, and similar insults one was more likely to hear during playtime for kindergartners than at Queen Mary’s). This in turn had made it hard for anyone to take him seriously, and it had sent the four clan members nearly into stitches. Dialogue had been impossible after that, and Brian had felt more and more uneasy as Joshua and Lester continuously fired shots at Paul and Eli, who did the same to them in return.

‘I have a feeling that something is gonna go horribly wrong sooner or later,' Brian spoke out, attracting the attention of all three of his friends. ‘I mean, these fights are already getting out of control, but more than some bruises and bleeding noses hasn't happened yet. But today an entire table was turned over, and people threw tableware at each other. At this rate it's only a matter of time before people will get seriously injured. You know, breaking an arm, or somebody stabbing someone else in the eye, or… worse than that.'

He did not have to specify what he meant by worse than losing an eye; they all knew. And while it might seem like something of a stretch to associate canteen fights with murder, it at times did not seem like the two were that far removed from each other. They had all seen some people coming out of fights looking quite battered and messed up, and if Brian recalled correctly, he'd already seen someone walking around on crutches after having gotten into a row with Clyde. Moreover, it would not be the first time Queen Mary's would see casualties under her roof. Within John's time of being here, he'd been the witness of someone dying of an eating disorder, a drug overdose, and there had been the suspicious case of Jimmy's suicide. Brian would not put it past the current population of Queen Mary's to create more victims, be it directly or indirectly.

There was silence again for a moment, during which all four of them seemed to contemplate the possible scenarios that more violence and hostility could lead to. Even now that they had moved far away from the scene of action, they could not detach themselves from it completely. Part of it was mentally - the images of people being carried off to the infirmary after having suffered a beating from either of the two groups were fresh in their mind, and they all realised that things could get worse than being carried off to the infirmary - being carried off by an ambulance to the first aid, the intensive care ward, or even to places beyond that. The other side of their inability to put the scenes behind them was physical. When listening closely, which one could do in the silence they had enveloped themselves in, they could still hear screaming and yelling in the background, and Brian felt sick to the stomach. This place was a disaster, an absolute catastrophe, and it seemed like something terrible had to happen first before people would get their head out of their asses and do something about it.

‘I won't let anything happen to you, Brian.'

Completely absorbed in his own thoughts, Brian had not even noticed that John had gotten up from his bed and was now seating himself next to him. His partner's hand found his and he carefully patted it as he looked Brian in the eyes and said: ‘I'll do everything I can to keep you safe.'

‘Me too,' Roger joined in before Brian could pull himself together and thank John for his promise. ‘I'll stick a needle inside anyone who dares to hurt you.'

‘And me,' Freddie added without skipping a beat. ‘We've always got each other's backs. Physically I might not be able to do much, but I can sass people better than anyone. Better than John even, I dare say.' Roger chuckled and John cocked an eyebrow at him, but all Brian could think of was how blessed he was to have Freddie, Roger, and John around him. He knew all too well that no, perhaps they were not the most muscled beefcakes around, and no, they might not be able to knock someone out in one punch. But what they could do was provide love and support, and to Brian this was a whole lot more meaningful than any knowledge or skill of the martial arts. Being surrounded by fifty tough guys like Drew could not make him feel as safe and protected as his friends could, and he knew that whatever would come of him at- or after Queen Mary's, he'd always be grateful for having met these three men. These three soulmates.

‘Thank you, guys. You all mean a lot to me. We'll- we'll pull each other through this, whatever this takes,' he said, and he was sure that at least John heard the crack in his voice, for which he carefully squeezed his hand to wordlessly tell him it was all going to be okay. Brian gave him a smile to let him know he was doing just fine, and John, knowing Brian did not enjoy lingering on a sensitive note like this for too long, pushed forwards the conversation.

‘Speaking of pulling each other true,' John started. ‘I think it's about time we should pick up lunch again.' A stern look followed in the direction of Freddie, who pulled off a grimace.

‘That's not what I meant when I said we had each other's back,' Freddie told him.

‘No, but it was what _I_ meant when I said I'd keep you safe. And when I told Jasper that I'd take care of you,' John said, carefully letting go of Brian's hand and moving back to his own bed to pick up the plate he'd put down on his nightstand.

‘Can't we just catch up during dinner tonight?' Freddie tried.

‘No, because I know that that is an empty promise,' Roger said, hooking an arm through Freddie's when his boyfriend seemed to want to move away as John sat down in front of him on the floor. He gave a slice of apple to Roger, who broke a piece off of it and presented it in front of Freddie's face.

‘Take a bite, love,' Roger said, but Freddie kept his lips sealed. ‘Come on, do it.'

Freddie shook his head defiantly. ‘I can't eat when there's three people gazing at me like this.'

‘We can play a game in the meantime?' Brian proposed, nodding towards the abandoned game of Mensch-ärgere-dich-nicht on the floor next to Roger's bed. ‘Get your mind off the matter for a bit.' The idea was accepted with gratefulness by Freddie, and with a little reticence from Roger's side, out of fear that Freddie would use the board game as a way to escape eating.

In the end, it all worked out fine. The game helped ease the tension of eating on Freddie, who, now that he felt less like he had six eyes continuously prodding into his soul, was less inclined to protest whenever Roger brought up a slice of apple or tomato. He even managed to get a few bites of toast - with the butter scraped off, that was - past Freddie's lips, as his partner was more focussed on winning the game than wasting time on arguing over a matter they all knew he was going to lose anyway in the end.

The game at the same time also provided a means of distraction from the situation around them. While trying their best to forget the upheaval they had experienced during lunch, they could not help being reminded of it at several moments during their game. It wasn't even that somebody brought up anything related to the fights - just having a group of people storm upstairs and loudly declare that 'everything was Drew's fault' because 'he had slapped one of Clyde's people in the face the evening before' was enough to remind them of the turmoil they'd escaped from. And then, just when everything seemed to have quieted down again, the weak but ever loudening noise of either a police car or an ambulance nearing the building caught the attention of all of them.

'What on earth-' Roger said as he pushed himself up from the bed. Brian gave Freddie a stern glance when he tried putting back the slice of apple Roger had given him upon standing up, and Freddie reluctantly put it in his mouth.

'Police or ambulance?' John asked without taking his eyes off the boardgame before him.

'Police. Quite a few of them,' Roger said. 'There's four cars coming up.'

'Well, management will be happy about that. It'll be all over the news tomorrow,' Freddie predicted with a mouth full of half chewed-down apple.

'It's their own fault, really,' John shrugged. 'Staff's told them time and time again that we need more security and employees trained to work with violence issues if they want to prevent the police from getting involved.'

'I just hope that whoever called them won't be fired,' Roger said.

'They won't do that,' John said before Brian could worry about the prospect of one of the people he or any of his roommates depended on getting sacked. 'They can't even keep the place running properly as it is with the lack of staff. They won't fire anyone for less than arson or murder.'

With that, the topic was discarded and the game was recommenced. They wasted little more words on the topic of police storming in on Queen Mary's, even though Brian was positive it was on the minds of all of his roommates. He'd seen it happen before over the course of his stay; after the death of Jimmy, of course, and during a fight earlier that month. Back then, it had been a single police car with two officers showing up to make sure everything was okay, and to hear witnesses and inspect the damage that had been done to some of the furniture in the activity room in which the fight had broken out. The fact that four cars had shown up this time at high speed and with sirens ringing from seemingly miles away, seemed to Brian like a metaphorical manifestation of how things were slowly starting to get out of hand at Queen Mary's. If there were four police cars this time, how many would it be the next time? How much longer would it take for an ambulance to show up in the aftermath of one of these ridiculous clan wars?

A little carried away by these thoughts, Brian almost missed out on his entire turn in the game as Freddie eagerly tried to get hold of the dice again. Karma got back to him for this sneaky move, however; Brian scored four and was able to push one of his pawns over the finish line, while Freddie threw one too many and had to start over. They got so lost in the game, especially when it seemed to become a game on its own to tease Freddie and preventing him from victory time and time again, that they hardly noticed the knock on the other side of the door until it was repeated.

'Room 41? Is there anyone in there?'

Roger seemed a bit annoyed by having someone announce themselves at their door at the height of their game, but he got up from the bed either way. Freddie tried moving one of his partner's pawns back in his absence, and was given a smack against his hand by John.

'Who is there?' Roger asked a bit grumpily as he halted at the door without quite opening it yet.

‘Nolan. Could you open the door?'

Roger glanced back at his roommates, and Freddie motioned for him to let him in. Roger unlocked the door and opened it to reveal a flushed yet tired looking Nolan at their doorstep, holding a clipboard in one hand and a pencil between the trembling fingers of the other hand.

‘Nolan, are you alright? Roger, let him in, ill you,'  Freddie half-asked half-demanded, and Roger did as he was told. Nolan nodded in thankfulness and stepped over the threshold and into the room, after which the door was closed and locked behind him.

‘Thank you, Freddie. Don't worry, I won't stay for long-' Nolan started excusing his own presence, but Freddie wouldn't let him get very far.

‘Darling, are you alright? You look like you've been haunted down by a ghost.'

‘That isn't far from the truth,' Nolan sighed and allowed a smile, but his eyes weren't in it, and the four inhabitants of Room 41 could all see he was not doing as well as he pretended to be.

‘What's happened?' John asked his mentor, and Nolan raised his shoulders.

‘Nothing much. I mean, nothing much under the current circumstances. I've just sort of been running around the place ever since that Goddamned fight broke out- excuse my language,' he said professionally, but both Freddie and John waved his slip of the tongue away with a dismissive gesture of the hand, and Nolan continued. ‘So I've been running around the place to try and break people up, help the guards put people aside and bring them to the isolation cells, but I didn't get very far before I was needed in the infirmary. I'm also one of the few trained nurses around here, of course,' Nolan reminded them, and the people around him nodded. ‘We had quite some- uh, people who fell victim to their own fight. I'm glad that nobody got seriously injured, especially not innocent people who had nothing to do with it and were just having lunch when all hell broke loose.'

Freddie asked a question Brian knew for a fact they all had in mind, but which no one but him had the courage to ask. ‘What happened to the people that did get injured?'

Nolan plucked at the collar of his work uniform. ‘Officially I'm not supposed to tell you, but since you'll hear it soon enough anyway at a place like this… Drew was punched in the mouth and had a tooth smashed out. Someone kicked Clyde in the leg so hard that his shin has probably been broken, but the x-rays have to point that out for sure. We had to send the both of them to the hospital. Separate from each other, that is, because they still looked at each other as if they could kill each other if given the chance.'

Brian exchanged a knowing glance with John, and then with Freddie. This was exactly what they had predicted less than fifteen minutes ago; fights were getting more violent and more vicious, and it would only be a matter of time before the infirmary of Queen Mary's would not be able to handle the injuries themselves anymore, and would need to reach out to actual hospitals in the neighbourhood to patch people up again. They had seen it coming - just not at this short of a notice.

‘Other than that we were able to put up with things ourselves,' Nolan added hastily, as if not wanting to worry the patients all too much. ‘Jake got away with it with a bloody nose, and Paul has a bit of a limp because someone kicked him in the knee, but that's about it. Some others needed ice packages, and all of them a lecture on how to behave,' Nolan sighed.

Everyone nodded politely to let Nolan know they were listening, but Brian had a feeling one of the real questions had not been answered yet. ‘And what happens when they get back here?' Brian asked. ‘Drew and Clyde, that is?'

Nolan looked a bit uncomfortable and glanced at his clipboard for a moment, as if that would provide him with any meaningful answers. ‘Well, they'll be separated and put in isolation cells, as a start. But what will happen after that… We're not exactly sure yet,' he admitted. Then, after having scratched at the back of his head, he said: ‘As you might have come to notice lately, we're not equipped for these kinds of cases. Queen Mary's deals with things like depression, eating disorders, addictions-'

‘Deals with,' Brian heard John mumble beside him, and he had to chew on his bottom lip from letting a chuckle of pity escape him.

‘-behavioural issues, to a certain extent. But we're not equipped for, excuse the word, psychopaths. Drew was already testing our limits, and since Clyde and some others with sadistic personality disorders have been relocated to Queen Mary's, we've really been struggling. We don't have staff, or at least not enough, that's trained to deal with people with such heavy disorders. I'm only a nurse after all, and other than a few psychiatrists trained to work with sociopathic behaviour, we just don't have the people or the tools. Add to that the overall lack of staff and you've got this mess,' Nolan held up his hands as if to refer to the entirety of the institution.

‘It's okay. We know everyone is trying their hardest,' Freddie told him when no one else seemed to know what to say to this.

‘It's not okay,' Nolan nearly snapped back. ‘It's not okay when we have to put people in isolation for a week because we simply don't have the staff to deal with them. It's not okay when there aren't enough guards to break up a fight in the canteen during which people get seriously injured. It's not okay when we need to call the bloody police to help us pat people down and escort them to the isolation cells-'

Nolan's voice got progressively louder as he let his frustration run free in speech, but he caught himself before it could get out of hand, as he always did. ‘Sorry. I shouldn't bother you with this.'

‘Don't worry about it,' John said. ‘You have a right to vent about all of this just as much as any of us.' Brian found himself nodding to show Nolan he agreed with his boyfriend. Nolan telling them about all that was going wrong at Queen Mary's, especially with a regard to the lack of staff and the heavy cases they were given without the proper tools to handle them, reminded him of the speech Jasper had given shortly after Ariel's disappearance from the scene. It had been well over a month, if Brian remembered correctly, and there still was no sign of her or her return. Rumours had spread widely across the clinic, with the general consensus being that she must have been sexually assaulted or something the like to keep her from working for so long a time, but staff did not want to confirm nor deny this story. Despite everything, there was a little pang of relief inside of Brian that Ariel was not present here today, because he would have hated for her sweet and hopeful soul to have to witness something quite like this.

‘It's… Let's just move on from this point,' Nolan said, and he brought out his notepad. He was obviously upset, and hiding behind the clipboard wasn't going to keep his audience from noticing this. ‘I basically just dropped by to see if everybody was safe and sound. So let me just cross off… Bulsara, Deacon, May… and… ah, there's Taylor,' Nolan said as he removed them from his check-up list. ‘Have none of you been hurt in any way during the fight?' The four friends looked at each other, but were unanimously able to tell Nolan that nothing had happened.

‘Very good. Then the next point on the list - the police is also still looking for witnesses. Have any of you seen anything you think might be useful for them to know?'

The mentioning of police looking for witnesses, and possibly looking to open a case about the incident, made Brian's ears. Perhaps there was a possibility, then, that finally the outside world would get to see a glimpse of the daily operation of Queen Mary's, and the appalling conditions under which people worked and lived. He was a little disappointed when Nolan added that it was just for an internal report, that police was helping them reconstruct the affair and give them tips on how to prevent such a situation in the future, but decided not to show Nolan these sentiments.

When all of them agreed that they did not have anything meaningful to contribute, due to the distance between their corner of the canteen and the one in which the row broke out (not to mention the event with the flying slice of tomato, which, indeed, they decided not to mention to a staff member, regardless of how comfortable they felt around Nolan), the mentor moved on to the last point of his list. ‘Finally, I was going to tell you that a second lunch session will start at half past one. Drew and Clyde and their groups have been rounded up for the time being, so hopefully everyone can eat in peace this time,' Nolan smiled mildly. ‘But I already hear from Jasper that you had taken a plate of food with you to your room, so if you're not hungry anymore, feel free to pass.'

‘We'll pass,' Freddie said, to which Nolan looked a bit sceptical; when Roger assured him they'd made sure Freddie had eaten, and in fact better than he probably would have in the canteen even under normal circumstances, he seemed accepting of their choice to not go the second lunch session.

‘Well, then I'll be on my way. It's already… one o'clock already, and I need to round up everyone before half-past one for lunch,' Nolan said, but as he shoved his sleeve back to look at his watch, he revealed at the same time his lower arm, and the sight of it caught Brian's attention. It was red, swollen, and the shape of fingers was clearly marked into the skin. Brian would even swear he could see something that looked suspiciously much like the prongs of a fork or even teeth just below his mentor's elbow, but Nolan distracted his arm from view when he caught Brian staring.

Brian was not the only one who had seen the damage on his body, though. Whereas he was too shocked to share what he had seen right away, Roger was quick to shriek: ‘Nolan, your arm!'

‘What? Oh, it's nothing. Just caught a few punches while trying to pull some people apart,' Nolan said as if it was a minor inconvenience, but even though he had already yanked his shirt sleeve back over the exposed area, the sight of those small, red punctures right there on Nolan's lower arm did not leave Brian - and neither did the pained smile on his face. ‘Don't worry about it, okay? You've got enough on your mind as it is.' While Brian could not disagree with the fact that they had a lot on their mind already, not worrying about their mentor as the signs of physical abuse were literally right there on his body was easier said than done.

‘Listen, guys. Let's all just take this as calmly as we can. Just stay in today and take some time to relax. Do you have to go anywhere?' Nolan asked.

‘Oh, shit. I do, I've got a meeting with my dietician at four,' Freddie sighed, burying his face in his hands as he came to this realisation.

‘So do I,' Roger added. ‘Well, not with your dietician, but with my addiction counsellor. Also at four.'

‘I see,' Nolan frowned. ‘I would tell you to stay in, but that's really not beneficial to your progress. Unless you're still very upset by what happened, that is,' Nolan said, which Brian could appreciate despite it obviously not being necessary for Freddie and Roger, who shook their heads in unison.

‘No, we'll go. We're fine,' Roger said on behalf of both of them.

‘Alright then. And are you comfortable with going out there on your own? I can walk you to your session rooms if you'd like.'

‘Thanks, but we're fine,' Freddie said. ‘There's four of us.'

‘And besides, all the idiots should be locked away in isolation for the time being,' John added, to which Nolan sighed.

‘I hope we'll find a permanent solution soon, because this can't go on like this. It's unfair towards everybody involved,' he said, to which all of them could whole-heartedly agree.

‘I'll be going then,' Nolan announced for the second time, but this time around he did actually turn towards the door and unlocked it carefully. ‘If there's anything you need help with, or anything you want to talk about, find me in my room. Number six on the ground floor, about five doors away from the right side of the canteen. I share it with Derek, Jasper, and Vic, but we'll find a suitable place with some privacy when you come over. I might not be in there today, because I still have to finish these call rounds, and then we have patient progress meetings among the staff,' Nolan said, which was a concept of which Brian hadn't heard before, but the rest of his roommates seemed to be familiar with it, or at least pretended to be so as they nodded. ‘That is, if they won't be cancelled after today's stunts in the canteen. I should be in tomorrow at any rate. Alright?'

‘Perfect. Look after yourself, Nolan,' Freddie said as he got off the bed.

‘Same goes for you, folks. Look after yourself. We'll sort it all out - don't worry about it too much,' he said, before he disappeared around the door with his clipboard, his one arm hanging a bit awkwardly by his side, and an expression that dropped from confident to tensed the second he turned around and thought no one was paying attention to him anymore.

 

# # #

 

‘We'll leave you to Mr Greyson then. Make sure you behave yourself, son.'

‘ _John_ ,' Freddie rolled his eyes and gave a quick glance in the direction of the door, at which his dietician was standing and obviously trying to oppress a snicker. ‘Stop embarrassing me.' John, however, was unfazed by this criticism and continued his speech.

‘Do as you're told and don't talk back to your dietician. Your mum and I will come pick you up in an hour.' Freddie looked as if he was about to die from second-hand embarrassment due to his friends' behaviour, but before he could open his mouth and say something to make John shut up, Brian had taken a lead of the conversation already.

‘Me? I thought you were the mum and I was the dad.'

‘No, it's got to be you. I don't have any of the female qualities you possess,' John said without batting an eye, in which Brian copied him as he asked his follow-up question.

‘Really? And which would those be?'

‘Well, you're a lot more patient than I am. More organised, too. I'm sure our boys see you as a mother figure a lot more than they see me-'

‘I regret asking you to bring me over,' Freddie grumbled before he marched through the door of the office in which his session was going to take place.

‘We love you too!' John called behind him with a kissy hand, which earned him one more chuckle from Mr Greyson, a man in his late thirties who could obviously see the humour in his client's hands-on friends. Brian was unsure what effect Mr Greyson's siding with them instead of with his own patient would have on the session with Freddie, but knowing their friend, Freddie realised they were just kidding, and they were positive he would be able to laugh about it, too, once he'd come out of the office again in an hour approximately, when Brian and John would be back to pick both him and Roger up.

‘God, imagine actually being the parents of those two,' Brian grinned as they sauntered back into the direction they came from. John grimaced, but his facial expression lightened up a little when he thought of something.

‘Perhaps I'd be allowed to smack some sense back into them if I were their father.'

‘That'd probably only make them even more defiant,' Brian remarked. ‘Besides, they're doing pretty okay lately, aren't they?'

‘I mean, if you leave out Freddie ending up in the infirmary last week and finding Roger lying next to his bed with a syringe up his arm, they're doing pretty alright,' John commented sarcastically.

Brian blushed slightly. ‘These last few days or so, at any rate. It's always a case of looking at things day by day with the two of them.'

‘With all of us, to be honest,' John corrected him, which was something Brian found he could not deny. It was not just Freddie and Roger whose situation was always to be judged day by day - John and he were no different in that matter. The only difference was that Freddie and Roger had a tendency to act out when they were doing poorly, they would stop eating or start rummaging around for drugs respectively, while John and he were far more likely to turn inwards and become unapproachable to anyone. Anyone but each other, with a bit of luck, but on especially bad days they could not even let each other in on their thoughts and feelings. Their depressions could lure them in so deeply that they could do nothing but sit and stare at the wall or ceiling across of them and avoid all human contact. Luckily, this had not happened in quite a while to either of them; what was more, all of them had been having a great last few days, which was something even John acknowledged.

‘But we've all been doing pretty well this week so far. You've been feeling good, I've been pretty sociable I think, Roger's recovered from his cold turkey, and even Freddie hasn't been that much of a disaster at mealtime the past few days.’

‘You're right,' Brian agreed. ‘It's great to have all of us feeling well for once. I'm not sure if I've ever seen us all like this before,' he said with a sad smile, and he felt John grab his hand to squeeze it shortly. No one was present in the hallway apart from them, but still the pair of them preferred to keep any public display of affection short and subtle.

‘I'm sorry you have to see us poorly so often,' John said. ‘It's not exactly good for your progress.'

Brian shrugged. ‘It's not as if you can help it.'

‘No, but I wish I could. You deserve better than being stuck with three heavyweights pulling you down,' John said.

‘You're not pulling me down. You three have been keeping me up from the start, and I wouldn't trade any of you for the world.'

‘Me neither. Especially not you,' John said, and Brian had never wished more badly that he could just grab John, dip him low, and kiss him like he'd never been kissed before right there in the middle of the corridor. Knowing he couldn't, he let his hand touch John's for just long enough for his boyfriend to get the message, but without risking having the producer of the footsteps that came out of one of the rooms behind them spot it.

‘So what do you want to do now?' John asked when they reached the crossing between the canteen, the stairs, and the hallways towards the community rooms and the outside exit of the building. ‘We've got about an hour, but the weather isn't particularly good.'

Brian glanced through the windows of the almost empty canteen as if this would give him inspiration to answer the question he had been asked. Normally John and he would either go outside or stay in their room to play music, to talk, or just to sit or lie close to each other and perhaps share a cuddle or two. Today, however, going outside didn't seem too much of an option, and he did not feel like going back to their room again. They'd already spent the entire afternoon there, and would be there in the evening again, since Freddie had made all of them formally promise they'd be there to finish the game of Monopoly he was positive he was going to win despite John nearly having bankrupted him moments before they'd needed to leave and go to their counsellors.

‘We could go to one of the community rooms?' Brian proposed, and John cocked his head at him a bit inquisitively. Neither Brian nor he were the ones to go there on their own account, but John could see his point when Brian explained his suggestion. ‘I mean, everyone who would usually bother us is now either at first aid or in isolation.'

John chuckled. ‘You've got a point there. So where do you want to go?'

There were not too many options; the canteen was not a place Brian considered to be a fun place to stay at, and the sad excuse of a library didn't really excite him either. What remained was the activity room, which had been the decorum of many recent tensions and rows, and the fitness room at which Freddie would spend all his free time if he'd be allowed.

‘We can go to the fitness room,' Brian said. ‘It's usually not too crowded around there, and we won't have Freddie to keep an eye on for once.' John looked like he seriously contemplated the idea - they'd been in the fitness room before, but that had mainly been to look after Freddie, knowing that he could not be stopped from going there and that it might be safer to go with him instead of letting him wear himself out without the supervision of someone whose did not have weight loss as a primary and only goal. They'd never actually gone to the place on their own account, which seemed to be the reason why John seemed into the idea.

‘Sure, why not. Could be fun,' he agreed.

‘We'll just see if there's any space,' Brian said, and together they walked past the canteen, the laundry room, some offices of staff members they had no personal connection to and had therefore never visited before, until they ended up at the gym. A woman they recognised from the pharmacy and medication desk was sitting around bored and taskless, and rose from her chair when they entered the room to write down their names and numbers - Queen Mary's policy for administrative purposes or whatever they wished to do with that information - and a bit of a chat. They spoke of the fight of that afternoon and of how illness of multiple of her co-workers had landed her in the not so exciting position of keeping an eye on the gym, after which Brian and John were told by her to ‘have fun' and ‘come see her if they needed any help'. Brian soon knew that there would be no need for support or explanation concerning the gym - there was simply too little equipment, let alone advanced and complicated equipment, that would require the knowledge of outsiders.

Queen Mary's fitness room was quite spacious, granted, but shockingly empty when compared to the space it occupied within the building. A handful of pedalled home trainers facing the window at the back wall were probably the most impressive machines; other than that there were two press benches, a stack of weights to practice weightlifting, and a large gym mat Brian recognised from physical education in middle- and high school. The walls were empty save for a few large, crumpled posters with models in outdated sports clothing performing morning fitness positions, on which various large noses, glasses, moustaches, and poor copies of male genitalia had been drawn. It was a sad excuse for a gym, but this also had its merits. There was nobody present save for one guy on a pressing bench and two young men Brian recognised from Freddie's eating disorder talk group doing some stretching exercises on the mat, meaning that Brian and John could slip in without drawing the attention of too many people.

‘Weight-lifting or cycling without moving forwards?' John asked, and Brian smiled.

‘Unless you want to embarrass ourselves in front of- ah, four entire people, I'm going with cycling.'

‘Speak for yourself!' John said quasi-indignantly. ‘For all you know I'm the strongest person you've ever met.'

‘But you are,' Brian remarked. John rolled his eyes.

‘Physically, I meant.'

‘My point still stands. Muhammed Ali wishes he were you.'

John snorted and Brian earned a playful shove against his upper arm, after which they moved on to the home trainers that looked so worn-down that Brian stopped for a moment to feel if they were steady enough to hold him. Sure, he had seen Freddie making use of them time and time again, but as Freddie was an estimated forty pounds lighter than he was, he did not dare jump on the stranded bicycle without feeling at its frame first. When he deemed it stable enough, he swung a leg over, and John followed his example. They put their feet on the pedals and cautiously started treading. They soon found that the gears of John's bike were broken, and that it was stuck in an extremely heavy acceleration, so John relocated to the machine on Brian's right side and picked it up again. Looking out of the window and sharing some small talk, they found themselves quite amused for a while, even though the activity of cycling without moving a single millimetre in any direction was a bit of a brain killer to Brian. On top of that, it seemed to Brian that the light atmosphere brought up something that had been stuck with him ever since that afternoon, and bringing it up to John now seemed like the best idea compared to having to find a right place and time without others to intrude on them later on.

‘Nolan didn't look very well today,' Brian broke from out of the blue to John, who stopped treading and turned to him for a moment as if to determine where this suddenly came from, before he looked out of the window again, pedalling on as before.

‘Not very surprising if you ask me,' John answered. ‘He's always up and running around the place. It seems like he's here twenty-four seven.'

‘Which might not even be far from the truth,' Brian said. ‘With all of the burn-outs and staff cuts they've been dealing with lately.'

‘Nolan really is the type of guy to feel responsible to take over those shifts, and put himself in a position where he'll work day and night if necessary,' John analysed. ‘Regardless of whether that's feasible or even responsible for his own well-being.'

‘He really seems to care,' Brian said. ‘Which is why I hated seeing him like that- with his arm-'

‘Yeah, what was the deal with his arm?' John asked as he turned to Brian. ‘Roger and you seemed all shaken up, and Nolan talked right over it before I could find out what you were talking about.'

‘You didn't see?' Brian asked with a touch of surprise that he knew he probably should not feel. Roger and he had been sitting a lot closer to Nolan than John and Freddie, who on top of that also had been sitting at the wrong side of him, as to say, when the sleeve slipping up their mentor's arm had shown the damage done to Nolan's arm. John just shook his head, so Brian set out to explain what he had laid eyes on earlier that afternoon.

‘Well, you remember when he went to check his watch and his sleeve slid back? I - and Roger, too, apparently - saw that his lower arm was completely red and swollen, and you could literally see the fingerprints on it. As if someone had grabbed him really tightly. And below his elbow it looked as if- I don't know. It seemed like there were these small indents, as if someone had either pierced him with a fork or just plainly bitten him. Just… put their jaws around his arm and bit him.'

‘Jesus Christ,' was the first thing John said when the seriousness of the matter dawned on him. ‘That must have happened when he tried breaking up that fight, or escort people into isolation or whatever. This is so fucked up, seriously- people are literally physically abusing the staff. First Ariel - presumably, that is, but I'm pretty damn sure someone put his hands on her, and now Nolan. This is honestly sickening.'

It wasn't often that John spoke out against things he disagreed with this fiercely. They got to see and hear unfavourable or downright unacceptable things on a daily basis at Queen Mary's these days, but John usually did no waste too many words on it, as gangs chasing each other down and syringes in the shower cabins seemed to have become part of the daily routine. However, a sensitive topic such as one of the few staff members they genuinely liked and appreciated for his efforts getting physically abused, was something that apparently got him talking. Brian could see in the lines of his face that he was upset, and he instantly felt bad for having brought up the topic.

‘I'm sorry. Maybe I shouldn't have told you. I didn't mean to upset you.'

‘No, it's okay. I'm glad you told me, sort of. I just feel really bad for Nolan,' John said. ‘He's been my mentor since the beginning, and has always stood up for me. He made sure my psychiatrist came to me and stayed during sessions when I was too depressed to leave my room for weeks. And before I had you I used to go to him if I needed someone to talk to - which wasn't often, but if I did, he was there for me. Even if I knocked on his door in the middle of the night, which I did at one point.'

Brian listened intently to this story of John's. Just like it wasn't often that John spoke out against conditions at Queen Mary's at length, he also did not usually talk about his time at Queen Mary's before Brian had come into the scene. The same was true for the depth of his depression, of which Brian had heard stories from Roger and Freddie, but never directly from John himself. He was surprisingly open these last few days, which Brian took as a sign that he trusted him despite his previous misstep of pressing him on about his parents, thank God.

‘It's just that I hate hearing about good people becoming the victims of the behaviour of the bad. Nolan is one of the most sincere and helpful people around this place, and I just want everybody to keep their paws off of him,' John said with a sigh that told Brian that this was the final comment on the matter. He agreed with John's stance, they shared a few words about hoping that Nolan would recover soon and that whoever was the culprit would be punished, before they moved on to more pleasant topics.

Or well, more pleasant… They looked around in the environment they had voluntarily admitted themselves, and started wondering why they had considered it a good idea to make a visit to the fitness room. The two men from Freddie's eating disorder talk group had moved on to the pressing benches, which had been vacant now that the guy previously working on them had disappeared without them noticing. Three new people seemed to have entered the room and gathered around the stack of weights, which they carefully tried out but seemed to toy with more than actually make use of. Soon enough, the weights were rolling around the room in what seemed to have developed into a competition of weight pushing instead of lifting. The guard near the entrance seemed stuck between telling the guys that they should use the weights for their proper purposes only, or just let them be since they were not bothering anyone else with it really. She eventually fell for the latter option, partly also because their enthusiasm about winning the race by rolling the weights a mere three inches further than each other was contagious, and it gave her something more interesting to watch than seeing yet thee other dudes pluck at weight lifting equipment.

Even to Brian and John, glancing sideways to see the three newcomers on their knees rolling equipment around the floor was the most enjoyable activity available in the room, and it didn't take long for them to lose their interest in the home trainers.

‘I'm bored,' John said with a major emphasis on the second word. ‘Are there really people who enjoy doing this for fun?'

‘I can hardly imagine,' Brian told him. ‘What do you even do here the entire time? You just sit on a bicycle that doesn't move no matter how hard you work. How does this not kill off like all of Freddie's remaining brain cells?'

John snorted. ‘You really think he has any left after spending all his free time in this sad excuse for a gym? But to answer your question, I think you should… put your focus on something. Count your breath or the number of tiles on the floor or the number of things of a certain colour you can spot. My sister and I used to keep ourselves busy like that during long car rides when we were young. Like, really young.'

This was one of the few times Brian heard his partner mention his sister - or any one family member, for that matter - other than when he'd asked him about his family in one of the first days after they'd met. He knew this was going to be a typical case of hit or miss since John had been very adamant about not wanting to talk about his past, but with John's recent openness in mind, he decided to take a leap of fate and go ahead to try and engage in conversation concerning his sister.

‘Your sister's name is Julia, right?' Brian asked as calmly as he could, not wanting to show John that he was nervous for the reaction he would get for bringing up John's family.

‘Yes, but everyone calls her Julie,' John said without skipping a beat or seeming o be caught off-guard by the fact that Brian talked of her. He therefore posed a second question.

‘How old is she now?'

‘She must be… Fifteen or sixteen now. Her birthday is coming up in June I think? Fifteen, then. She's almost five years younger than I am,' John said. Brian could not help but notice a hint of detachment in John's voice and the way he casually tried to recollect information on her birthday. It made him wonder if this was because he hadn't seen her in a long time - after all, he'd told Brian that he was not currently in touch with any of his family members, and hadn't been since he'd been admitted into Queen Mary's - and how feasible it therefore was to ask too many questions about his sibling.

Instead, after a few seconds of silence, Brian opted for saying: ‘I kind of envy you for having a sister. I was an only child, and I found it to be quite lonely at times.'

‘Having a sibling doesn't really save you from loneliness,' John answered instantly, making Brian look up at him but finding John staring out of the barred window in front of them.

‘Doesn't it? Most of my neighbours and other family members had multiple children and they always seemed to get on well. Or not always, but in general they seemed to have fun together. I feel like I would have liked that,' he admitted. ‘Just having someone of your own age you've known all your life whom you can hang out with and feel supported by, you know? Just someone you can talk to.'

‘I mean, yes, but just having a sibling doesn't automatically mean you'll have a great sibling bond with them,' John said with a voice flat as ever, but Brian could tell that this did not represent how he really felt about the matter. There was something hidden beneath John's feigned indifference towards his sister, and he carefully tried finding out what it was.

‘You didn't have that bond with Julie then, I presume?'

‘Not really, no,' John said flatly.

‘Did you not get along with her?' Brian asked.

‘I did. But the main problem was that we couldn't really talk,' John admitted, which Brian found to be quite something already for John to tell him. Maybe if he just tried one more step…

‘Clashing personalities? No common interests?'

‘No, it's more in the literal sense. My sister… she can't really talk. Like, physically she can't.'

‘Oh.' Oh, indeed. A very big _oh_. This was something Brian had never expected to hear, and although he tried not to show his surprise too much, knowing this would only put John off as he didn't like having too much attention on him, he could not help halting his movements on the useless home trainer and turning to face John. John continued to glance out of the window in front of him, seeming bent on not showing a single change in countenance, but Brian could tell by his clenched jaw that he was obviously holding himself back. From what exactly this should be, Brian did not know - whether his partner tried not to show sadness, anger, defeat, or annoyance. It was always hard gauging John's inner feelings, especially with a topic that to Brian seemed to carry such sensitivity as that of his sister apparently seeming to suffer from a certain degree of dumbness.

‘Uhu,' John agreed detachedly to Brian's defied reply, which was not much help for Brian, who was wondering how he could pick up the conversation again from this point. Oh and uhu were not exactly your typical eloquent, thought-provoking comments on which one could continue a discussion, and he had a feeling that John kept his answer unusually short and meaningless because he did not feel like talking of it. Brian could understand this, but felt like it would be strange to cut off the topic of his apparently partially disabled sister the second they trod on it. He did not want to insult John by either changing the topic or by going on about it, and yet, in the current situation and with John's reasonable openness that day, he eventually opted for the latter choice.

‘Can she like… not talk at all, or is she…' Brian started cautiously and somewhat clumsily. John, fortunately understanding what he was trying to ask, answered the question before Brian would be forced to ask if she was ‘completely dumb'. Brian had never thought of it before, but it suddenly struck him how utterly improper the very word of dumbness was to use when describing someone who did not possess the ability to speak. He was sure there was a medical term out there to describe the situation, but he did not know its name. Never before had he been in any situation where possessing knowledge of muteness was desirable, but God, how he wished he knew a little more so he didn't look like a dumbfounded idiot upon receiving the news of the condition of John's sister.

Luckily, John was not one to judge - not Brian, at any rate. His eyes were still fixed on the window, but his jaw unclenched a little as he informed Brian about the matter. ‘She can talk, but not very well. She can't form very coherent sentences or use more complex language than, let's say, a four or five-year-old,' he said. ‘They call it partial aphasia.'

Aphasia, that sure sounded a lot better than the crude sounding dumbness. Brian mentally repeated the word a few times in order to make it stick with him. Encouraged by John's not even uneasy way of telling his partner of his sister's condition, Brian, in a moment of boldness, went on to ask him: ‘Does it stem from problems with her voice or her jaw? Or was it caused by her having, erm… developmental problems?'

It was only when he had uttered the last two words and saw John's hands tightening around the grips of the unmoving bicycle that he realised what a sensitive topic it was he had entered upon, and he went on to apologise profusely. 

‘Sorry, I'm very sorry, John. I probably used the wrong words, I'm sorry- I shouldn't even be asking you such personal questions in the first time- the first place, I mean,' he stumbled on his words, but John, surprisingly, waved his concerns away.

‘It's okay,' John said surprisingly calmly for the information he was about to share. ‘It were developmental problems indeed. Sort of,' he added, and then both his expression and his tone of voice darkened. ‘Well, her speech development was fine, just like any other child, until she… she was five years old, and she got into an… accident, which left her in a rather bad place, you see. Ever since that her speech has been poor.'

The entire story came pouring out at once, not so much with ease but with a determination to get out the answer of the question at once without lingering on it for too long. It seemed as if John wanted to get it over with, wanted the reply to leave his lips before either Brian or he himself could put all too much thought to what he was saying. If this had been his goal, Brian had to agree that it most certainly worked; he for one was overwhelmed with the sudden and tragic reveal of the cause behind his sister's partial aphasia. He found himself staring at John, who by now had cast his eyes down to the windowsill. His jaw was no longer clenched, but Brian could tell he was chewing on his bottom lip, something he would do in times of emotional distress. Brian wished he could do something, anything to help him, but all he found himself capable of was giving him the usual apologies and statements of empathy. 

‘That's awful to hear, really. I'm very sorry to hear, Deaky. To be honest I don't really know what to say,' Brian admitted quietly. John just nodded, still not looking up.

‘It's okay. Or maybe not okay, but- well.'

Brian was left to helplessly watch as John tried to find an interest in readjusting the leather hand grip of the bike. He was still unsure what was going on inside of his partner's mind; whether it was sadness, anger, awkwardness, or denial that caused him to stare into nothingness like this. What he was sure of, however, was that John needed to be carefully lifted up out of this downright depressing cycle of questions, and that the conversation should end on a positive before they would move on to something less heart-breaking.

Brian gave a shot at turning around the conversation for the sake of John's mental state. ‘But can she like… erm, use alternative methods of communication? Sign language might work out better for her?' he half-asked, half-assumed, not for a second having guessed that this question would unveil a whole new layer of gravity that was apparently part of the case of Julie.

John faced him for a split second before he coughed and went on to tell Brian: ‘Actually the accident had a broader impact on her than just her speech. It affected her both mentally and physically, and her motoric skills are rather poor. She can't walk anymore, or sit up straight without support. I mean, physical therapy has helped her recover somewhat through the years, but she doesn't have control over her muscles enough to use sign language. And she probably doesn't have the mental capacity either. The accident sort of cut her brain development short, to put it lightly.'

Although John told Brian this part of the story with an air of nimbleness, to Brian there was nothing light about the further explanation of Julie's accident. Hearing that John's sister was rather impaired in her speech was one thing; being that she was unable to walk or sit and tied to a wheelchair in her daily life was something entirely different. Brian understood why John had kept the story of his younger sibling to himself for so long, and once again he felt terrible for being unable to do anything else besides showing him his sympathy.

‘I'm very sorry to hear, John. It must have been hard for you to grow up with.'

‘It's harder for her than for anyone else. She has to live with it year in year out,' John rightly remarked. Then, more quietly, he added: ‘And I think she still remembers the time before it all went down, as to say so. That she once was totally in control of her body and mind and that she could have a normal life like everyone around her, but which was all ruined when I… and she… it was too late.'

John suddenly cut his sentence off before Brian was able to make proper sense of the last few phrases he had attached to it before falling quiet. He looked at his partner to see that John's face was averted even more than before now that he was looking past the window, and Brian could swear he could see his hand trembling on the handlebar. ‘What was too late, sweetheart?' he asked carefully.

‘To save her. I wanted to, but I didn't know- it all went by so fast. It was so surreal,' John said, shaking his head as if it was a bad dream out of which he could not escape.

‘The accident? Were you there when it happened?' Brian asked. John had gotten back to chewing on his bottom lip, and the nod he gave was hardly visible. Brian felt his heart breaking. ‘Oh, darling…'

‘Stop,' John cut him short - not in a mean fashion, but one of self-defence, knowing that he could not take it to speak any longer of what he had gone through in respect to his sister. ‘I mean, please, we should stop now. I can't talk about it any longer.'

‘Of course. Of course, we'll stop right here,' Brian comforted him.

‘Thanks,' John said in the smallest voice. A soft but drawn-out sigh left his previously tightly pursed lips, and he picked up the pace of the training bike again as to find something to focus on now that he no longer had to save his attention and energy for the difficult topic they’d been addressing. Brian was left to once again look at him and decide what was best to do now. Of course he was going to have to move away from the topic of John’s sister, but he felt like he could not do this without addressing just one more little thing - not so much about Julie’s condition, but John’s way of opening up about it. 

‘John?'

‘Yes?'

‘Thank you for talking to me about your sister,’ Brian said softly. ‘I know it's hard for you to talk about, but I'm very proud of you.'

Brian knew John wasn’t one to take a compliment all that easily, but what he caught John mumbling under his breath yet still just loud enough to hear surprised him.

‘You wouldn't be if you knew.'

‘Sorry?' Brian asked. It was obviously something that was not meant for his ears, because even though he had only heard half of what John had said previously, he could swear John altered his sentence now that he was asked to repeat it.

‘You shouldn't be. It's not me you should be proud of. I'm not the one directly dealing with it every day,' John said.

Brian understood what John meant - he was indeed not the one living with the complications the accident had brought upon his sister. This, however, did not mean that he did not deal with the consequences of it to this day; the way he talked about it with audible difficulty was enough proof for Brian that it still very much upset his partner. ‘But indirectly you've lived through it, with her next to you, for most of your childhood. Probably longer than that, knowing you.'

John snorted, and for a moment Brian was afraid he was overdoing it.

‘Or am I being too sentimental now?’ he asked.

‘Not nearly enough,’ John said. ‘It's still with me every day even though I haven’t seen her in roughly two years. It's- it won't leave me, and I don't think it ever will.' His voice was starting to sound choked up. Brian had to pull all of his willpower together in order not to jump off of the dumb home trainer they’d placed themselves on so he could throw his arms around John and tell him everything would be alright. It would only make John shut down even more, and that was the last thing Brian wanted to do now that his partner was finally speaking up about something he’d obviously kept to himself for such a long time.

Therefore, Brian opted for saying: ‘Time might heal it. It can take decades to overcome trauma like… like witnessing your little sister getting hurt.'

‘It sure seems to do,’ John agreed flatly, but Brian could tell he was fighting against the tears. He could no longer resist the temptation to not physically comfort him, and placed a careful hand on John’s shoulder. He knew that John would shake it off if he didn’t feel comfortable with the gesture, which he - somewhat surprisingly - did not even do this time.

‘I'm here for you no matter how long it takes. I'm with you, John,’ Brian said in the softest, most confidential and loving voice he could produce. John’s voice was the exact opposite of this when he answered him.

‘I don't deserve that.'

Brian knew better than to be shocked to hear John say something self-deprecating like this by now, yet still he could not help turning to him rather intently and asking him: ‘Why not? Why would you not deserve support?' John remained silent for a few seconds, which was long enough for Brian to get a hunch of exactly what might be the reason behind John feeling like he didn’t deserve support from him or anyone else. ‘Please don't say that it's because it's your fault, your sister's accident.'

‘But it was my fault,’ John said softly. ‘I was supposed to protect her.'

‘Protect her against what?' Brian had stopped the movements of his leg by now so he could focus all of his attention on John. John did the same, but he used the newly harvested attention to pluck at the sleeve of his shirt. He seemed far away, so far away that it surprised Brian he could even still produce an answer, be it a fractured one..

‘Against… what happened that day. The fall, and- the lack of oxygen. The brain damage. I should have prevented it.' John’s fingers moved below the hem of his shirt and started moving along the pale skin of his inner lower arm.

Brian took a moment to drink in these separate words that together told him an entire story. A fall, a lack of oxygen, leading up to brain damage that left Julie hardly able to speak and cloistered to a wheelchair. It was terrible, really, to hear the pieces coming together in a gruesome accident that obviously had left John scarred for life, but what was worse to him was that John could possibly take up the blame for the misfortunes that had landed his sister in such a precarious situation. ‘John… It’s not your fault that your sister was hurt. You can’t take the blame for it.’

‘I can, and I will,’ John said in that stubborn voice that revealed a layer of vulnerability behind it. The tears were prominent in his eyes by now; no matter how hard he tried to hide it, Brian could tell his eyes were filled with tears. He knew this could go both ways in terms of John’s reaction, but he could impossibly sit there on that Godawful bicycle and just stare at John while his partner sat there right next to him sinking deeper and deeper into his own obviously hateful thoughts. Brian swung over a leg and positioned himself as much half in front- half next to John’s training machine, and placed his hands on either of John’s shoulders. John faced down, but he did not pull away from Brian’s grip, making Brian believe he could continue this way of handling him in the depth of his guilt.

‘Look at me, John,’ Brian told him. John ignored the order and moved his fingers across his lower arm faster than he had before. Brian thought it was just a way of distracting himself, but when he looked down, he saw John had turned from running over the skin with his knuckles to scratching himself with his fingernails, and was determined to put a stop to it.

‘Stop that, John. You’re hurting yourself.’

‘It’s what I deserve,’ John mumbled, and Brian felt his heart break once again, if still possible. He did not give himself the time to dwell on that for too long, though; this was about pulling himself together and acting quickly in order to prevent John from scarring himself even more, both physically and mentally.

‘Listen to me, John,’ he said, moving down one hand from John’s shoulder to his fingers to softly yet insistently remove them from the by now red skin on which welts and scars were displayed now that his sleeve was pulled up. ‘Whatever happened to Julie, it was not your fault. No accident could ever be blamed on you. You were a child - a literal child. How old were you when she was hurt?'

‘Nine.'

‘Nine years old,’ Brian repeated. ‘Is a nine year-old to be held responsible for the accident of his younger sister?’ he asked in what he hoped would be a rhetorical question, but which turned out not to be so according to John - or at least not to the people around John. 

‘I was,’ John said. The tears in his eyes forever seemed to be on the brink of falling down, but no matter how much Brian hoped they did so that John could finally let go some of the pain and hurt which had obviously been pent up regarding this subject, he bravely kept them to himself.

‘You shouldn't have been. No one can hold you accountable for anything that happened that day,’ Brian said sternly.

‘But they did. They still do to this day,’ John mumbled. Brian could sense that he was not exactly getting through to John, but he did not give up that easily.

‘Who are they, darling?’

‘My parents. Grandparents, and other family members- everyone,’ he choked out, and Brian sought for the right way to break the news to him that this could not be the case. No decent person would blame a child for the accident of another child, and he was sure that although it might appear to John that his family held him accountable, this could not have been their serious purpose to put the responsibility of Julie’s disability on her older brother.

‘John, I hate saying this, but I'm sure it's just in your head,’ Brian said softly. ‘No one can blame a preteen for the accident that overcame a kindergartner, most of all not the own family.’

‘So you don’t believe me?’ John asked with a sharpness that made Brian pause for a second. He had to be careful here - the last thing he wanted was for John to believe that he didn’t believe him in such a precarious situation, but he should show John’s that there was a difference between his family’s grief, his presence at his sister’s accident, and his guilt complex that followed it.

‘Of course I believe you,’ Brian hushed. ‘But listen to me, honey. I’m sure your family was very upset at the time of the accident and directly after it, and so must you have been. You were there when it happened, after all, and that’s a very traumatic experience to witness. It’s understandable that you feel guilty for your sister’s fate, and that you got caught up in that throughout the years,’ Brian continued in the calmest voice he could muster, and he could see John’s teary eyes look up at him at last. ‘But that does not make you responsible, regardless of what anyone’s told you over the years. Maybe your parents or aunts and uncles have said things about wishing it could have been prevented, wishing someone could have stepped in, or wishing you could have done something as you were there when it happens, but this does not mean they blame you. I’m sure that at no point they actually believed it was your fault - they just had difficulty processing what happened to Julie.’

John looked like he wanted to protest for a moment, but Brian opened his mouth again before John could. ‘Which does not at any point makes it pardonable that they put their troubles on you, but things like that sadly happen when people are in distress. But your family loves you, John. They love you and so do I.’

John grimaced at first, but smiled at these very last four words Brian spoke, and Brian could feel his tensed shoulders relax slightly under his own hands, which were still resting on them.

‘I’ll take that, then,’ John said softly. Brian knew in that moment that, although John still seemed to believe that he was to blame for the tragic accident of his sister and that his family thought similarly about the case, he had at least made the smallest breakthrough - the one where John knew that no matter what his position was in the case that appeared to still be fresh in his mind, Brian loved and supported him. For someone as socially closed and nearly eager to blame himself for all that went wrong around him as John, this really was a noticeable breakthrough, and Brian was proud of him.

He wished he could show John a sign of affection which he would do if they would be alone, but unfortunately they weren’t; and even though the chances of being caught sneaking a kiss to John in the presence of someone taking offence were small, Brian knew he could not take the risk. He therefore simply brought his hand up to John’s face and carefully stroked his thumb along the right side of his jawline. John met his eyes again, and Brian could see the tears shimmering in them still.

‘Everything will be alright,’ Brian whispered.

‘I don’t-‘ John started, but then cut himself short, as if he did not want to go into yet another aspect of the remaining psychological damage his sister’s accident and its aftermath had had on him. ‘I just hope she’s okay.’

‘I’m sure she is. I’m sure she’s in good hands,’ Brian said, at which John looked away from him.

‘I mean, my mother takes care of her,’ John shrugged, leaving Brian unsure about whether this was a positive or a negative thing.

‘Which is generally the best for a child,’ Brian was quick to say. ‘In difficult situations like these it’s important to have your family be at your side, don’t you agree?’

His partner’s jaw clenched again. ‘Uh-hum,’ he hummed in agreement, but Brian could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked John.

‘Yeah. Just- things are complicated,’ John mumbled.

‘I know they are. Need distraction?’ Brian asked. The last thing he wanted to do was to say or do anything that would take John down again just now that he had recovered some of his spirits again.

John nodded determinedly.

‘Come on. Let’s see if those guys are up for some competition,’ Brian said with a nod towards the three young men who by now were lying on their front on the floor as they rolled around their weights. John snorted but didn’t object; in fact, he seemed quite into the idea. Brian wasn’t sure if this was because he’d take on any opportunity to get away from the topic they’d spoken about at great length for his standard, or if he genuinely was in the mood to throw some weights around. He feared it was rather the former of the two, but he decided that now was not the right time to dwell on about that for too long. John had told him more about his family history in one afternoon than he had done during the rest of their joined stay at Queen Mary’s, so right now really wasn’t the time to go into his detail. He’d bring it up either tonight or tomorrow, or whenever a good occasion arose again. He wasn’t in too much hurry; he just wanted to make sure John knew he was proud of him.

‘Don’t worry about your sister too much,’ Brian said as to close the topic off on a positive note, giving John’s hand a bit of a squeeze as he stepped off of the bicycle he had been sitting on until that moment. ‘I’m sure she’s fine. And we can always write her a letter, if you’d like? Your mum could read it to her. We can send it from my name if you still don’t have the privileges to write or receive letters,’ he added thoughtfully. He could swear he saw John’s gaze darken for a split second, but the expression was gone from his view before he could really take it in, as John leant towards him and threw his arms around him.

‘Thank you,’ John murmured against the shell of his ear with what seemed to be audible difficulty. Brian simply smiled and embraced him back, trying his best to ignore the feeling of the heated, clawed-at skin of John’s lower arm as it brushed against the back of his neck.

 

# # #

 

The remainder of the hour was spent surprisingly pleasantly in the at first so boring looking fitness room. They were immediately accepted into the competition of weight rolling by the three inventors of the game, and had a great laugh with them for the duration of the match. No one was exactly counting points or keeping scores of any kind, so to make out a winner would be impossible, but it immediately became clear that the red-haired guy and the boy with a birthmark on his left cheekbone from the other team were a lot better than they were. Perhaps it was because they’d had some practice for an approximate twenty minutes before they were joined by Brian and John, because neither of them looked particularly strong or muscular in stature. The odds changed, however, when the boy with the birthmark proposed a game of jeu de boules, and when winning was no longer based on the strongest rolling but on the most accurate swings. John was surprisingly good at this, and seemed to have a decent amount of fun in the game, smiling and exchanging witty comments with the other men.

Brian kept himself a bit more on the background, deciding that this was John’s time to shine, as it was. it was good to see him enjoy himself, especially after such a hard topic had just been discussed between the pair of them. He was glad to see John seemed to have put that past him, or at least for the occasion. He did not doubt that it still ran through John’s mind, quite possibly all throughout the game, but he seemed able to focus on things other than the sadness and guilt Brian knew for a fact continued to weigh down on him. The idea that John blamed himself for the accident with his sister continued to be something that didn’t sit right with Brian, who had already decided that this was a matter he needed to address again once they found themselves in the right position for it.

As he himself chatted away about the poorly looking gym and the frankly comical additions of moustaches and glasses to the workout posters on the wall, it occurred Brian that this was the first time John and he had voluntarily mingled with people other than their roommates during their joined stay. Sure, they’d exchange some words with people from their therapy group, and sometimes chatted to others when they were addressed in line for food or medicines. Going up to others to start a conversation was something that was new to him, and he was positive John hadn’t tried this either during his stay at Queen Mary’s before Brian’s arrival. It was something neither of them ever felt the need for, especially not now that they had each other.

Still, it was nice to spend a little time with people other than their roommates, and Brian felt himself actually regretting having to leave at a few minutes to five as not to break the promise of picking up their friends from therapy. John similarly seemed to be wishing they could stay a little longer, but pulled himself together and said goodbye to their company. It was in these final minutes that it dawned on them that none of them had properly introduced themselves to the other, so they were quick to exchange names and room numbers. They did not make any future arrangements, but Brian had a feeling that they would get to see each other around the place sooner or later. After all, Queen Mary’s housed no more than a few hundred people who came together in the canteen thrice every day, and Brian was sure he’d spot the red-headed boy, guy with the birthmark across his cheek, and their somewhat less remarkable friend somewhere sooner or later.

John and Brian got up from the floor and signed out at the improvised desk of the guard, who seemed a little sad that part of her only entertainment in the room was taking leave. They made a promise of coming back sometime when they had time off, and possibly bringing in some other people too. Brian was sure it would be no problem to convince Freddie to go to the gym, and Roger probably would not put up much of a struggle if he heard he would get to throw weight lifting material around.

‘That was more fun than I’d expected when you first dragged me into the fitness room,’ John admitted as they made their way through the hallway.

‘I didn’t expect that either,’ Brian said. ‘I just wanted to have a look around now that none of the usual troublemakers are around. But that we’d end up playing improvised games of jeu de boules with people I’d never even seen before…’

‘They were nice, though, and very creative. I never would have come up with the idea of making a competition out of rolling ten-kilo weights across the floor.’

Brian smiled. ‘I guess you have to be creative if you don’t want to die of boredom in here. You need something to keep you busy even if you don’t fancy reading journals from the 1800s, draw with a pencil you’re not allowed to sharpen because staff will think you’ll kill someone with it, or beat people up in the activity room after dinner.’

John snorted at this enumeration of the average activities that kept the patients of Queen Mary’s occupied in between meals and therapy sessions. ‘Whatever gets you through the night.’

‘Maybe we can take Roger and Freddie here, too, if we’re all off at the same time,’ Brian spoke the thought that had been on his mind for a little while by then.

John grimaced. ‘Not too sure how good of an idea it is to let either of them handle weights.’

‘What do you think will happen?’ Brian asked as they turned around the corner and entered the hallway in which the office of Roger’s counsellor was situated.

‘What won’t happen?’ John corrected him, and Brian chuckled - he knew he was in for a colourful explanation straight from John’s fantasy starting that second. ‘First of all, they’ll get pissed because they’re too weak to lift up those things. They’ll try to do so anyway, but Freddie might collapse upon lifting one of those five-kilo things up. Roger might not be much better,’ John said. ‘I’m positive one of them will drop a weight on their toes sooner or later, or worse even, on each other’s toes. And you know all Hell’s gonna break loose when that happens. Not to even mention that neither of them can deal with losing a game. Have you seen Freddie’s face whenever he loses a game of Mensch-ärgere-dich-nicht?’

During John’s disquisition the pair of them had reached their destination, and Brian leant against the door, flashed a smile towards a bystander waiting for his turn on therapy, and listened to the not even invalid points his partner mentioned. ‘He still really thinks he stands a chance winning from me at Monopoly, doesn’t he?’

‘He does, and it’s pathetic. You literally bankrupted him when you made him pay mortgage over Times Square and Trafalgar Square in succession,’ John said.

‘I hope it won’t be the first thing he’ll start talking about when he gets out of therapy, because I don’t feel like being dragged back into our room and getting locked up until the game’s finished,’ Brian said, even though he knew chances of this happening were against his favour. If Freddie got sucked into something he’d focus on it like a pilgrim on the destination of his pilgrimage, and something was telling him that they would spend the remainder of the day (and with a little bad luck, the beginning of tomorrow, too) quarrelling over fictional mortgages and street purchases in Monopoly.

‘You know it will be. The only chance we stand is if we drag out dinner very long,’ John said.

‘And volunteer to clean up the canteen and do the dishes,’ Brian added.

‘I’m tempted to do so, that’s how much I’d like to escape Freddie and his Monopoly antics. Can you imagine?’ John groaned as he rubbed his forehead with his thumb and index finger. Brian grinned, but the smile soon faded from his face when the opening of the door behind him nearly made him tumble backwards into the newly created vacuum behind him. It was John who caught his arm before he could fall and thus saved the day.

‘Brian!’ exclaimed Roger, who stared at his friend with big eyes. ‘What on earth-‘

‘I forgot how doors work,’ Brian said self-reprovingly, and Roger snorted.

‘We can’t all be born geniuses like me of course.’

‘Sure. Roger Taylor, the coke-addicted genius,’ John said, and which earned him a jab in his ribs with Roger’s bony elbow.

‘At least I understand what drugs are. I think my counsellor might need to have his knowledge on drugs brushed up,’ Roger grumbled.

‘Why would you say that?’ Brian asked as he put the first steps into the direction of Freddie’s room in the hope to get his friends to move along with him. Once they arrived at their destiny in the hallway adjacent to the previous one, they soon found Freddie’s session wasn’t over with, which gave Roger the opportunity to explain in detail the incompetency of his counsellor, who once admitted himself ‘had never smoked a single cigarette in his life,’ and who therefore had no idea what it was like to be addicted. His suggestions of finding distraction in reading or walking had left Roger blinking at him in misunderstanding, and the idea that maybe praying might get his mind off his thirst for cocaine had made Roger struggle in order not to burst out in laughter right into his face. John said with the straightest face he could produce that it might not be that bad of an idea for Roger to try and find Jesus, at which Roger took offence and would have landed them into a crisis if it hadn’t been for Freddie bursting through the door just when it seemed like Roger would say something he might regret later.

Freddie was cheerful as usual, especially now that he had been released from his by now nearly daily ‘torture sessions’ with his dietician. His mentor had decided after his most recent admission to the infirmary for complications with his severe underweight that he had to see his dietician every single day. While Brian was afraid it did not exactly make things better by forcing Freddie to talk of food against his will every single day, but to be quite honest, he had no idea what else they could do at this point. He’d already gotten bans from the gym multiple times, taken in at the infirmary, even had been literally tied down and force-fed, but none of it had a lasting effect on him - if anything, it made things worse. Freddie needed more specialist help, but since this wasn’t available - at least not at Queen Mary’s - the best they could do was give him as much help as they could, and construct a network of support around him for the difficult times he went through on a daily basis; a network Brian hoped they could give Freddie as much as they could.

‘I still can’t believe Derek would do this to me,’ Freddie said dramatically as he closed the door of the office behind him with a louder smack than necessary. ‘It’s been less than five days and it’s already driving me out of my mind. Talking about having to eat every single day. And that guy wants me to eat at least seven hundred calories a day. Seven hundred!’ he repeated in utter disbelief that made his friends exchanged concerned glances among each other.

‘Darling, you know seven hundred is like the bare minimum to get by on,’ Roger eventually broke the news to him.

‘It’s not. I can live on half of that,’ Freddie said with a hint of pride that was nearly painful to listen to.

‘It’s what you call living,’ John said, which Freddie chose to ignore.

‘I’ll have a word with someone around here. Derek won’t work, and Blankenship won’t listen to me either. Maybe I should reach out to someone at the infirmary?’ Freddie pondered out loud.

‘I think you should leave it as it is, Freddie,’ Brian said. ‘Those people are medical professionals. They know what they’re doing,’ he said with as much conviction he could muster, giving Roger a stern glance when his friend looked like he wanted to bring up recent experiences with his own therapist.

Still, even without Rogers prompting, Freddie asked: ‘Are you sure of that? Do you trust your therapist in all they say?’

‘Well,’ Brian started. ‘Of course you always have to assess everything people say critically, but at the end of the day I do trust Sarah.’ He received a glance from all three men around him that seemed to convey a can’t-relate-message, and brainstormed for something to answer them with. He knew that John’s psychiatrist had established himself to be more than mildly homophobic, Roger’s counsellor clearly had no idea what he was talking about, but Freddie’s dietician seemed to be doing his job right as far as Brian could see. It was not Blankenship’s goal to be likeable, after all; his job was to get Freddie over his resistance of eating, which was something his patient obviously did not wish to cooperate with.

‘Oh, there you are! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!’

Before either Brian or anyone else of the group could come up with something to say on the matter of the trustworthiness of their medical and psychological professionals, their attention was drawn to a familiar voice and a pair of footsteps walking into their direction. They turned around to see Nolan coming towards them in a somewhat awkward pace that lay between walking and running, as if he was in a hurry to reach them before they could escape him now he had finally found them.

‘Nolan, dear, you arrive at exactly the right time!’ Freddie emitted, obviously pleased with the staff member’s arrival, and wasting no time to even let Nolan fully catch up to them before he started speeching. ‘Listen, Derek sentenced me to absolute _torture_ after I got back from the infirmary, and now I have to see Blankenship every single day. Can you please have a word with him? Because this is ridiculous,’ Freddie said to a somewhat taken-aback looking Nolan, who - just having halted at their group and still in the process of catching his breath - had not seen this request coming.

Roger, who recognised the look of surprise on Nolan’s face, suggested: ‘Perhaps you should let Nolan say what he came for first, Freddie.’

‘Thanks,’ said a visibly grateful Nolan, who did not take in the indignant look Freddie throw both him and his partner. ‘Thanks, because I’ve got some amazing news to share with you, and I really can’t keep it to myself any longer than I already have.’

This piqued the interest of all four men. ‘Amazing news?’ Roger asked.

‘Truly amazing news. The best I’ve been allowed to share in a while,’ Nolan smiled. ‘Do you remember that earlier today I said I had to go to a patient meeting, where we discuss the progress of our individual patients and their treatment here at Queen Mary’s?’ He received acknowledging nods from the men around him. ‘Well, we’ve gone over your cases and found that all of you have made progress of some sort, which sets you closer to being released from Queen Mary’s and being allowed to leave eventually,’ Nolan said, which surprised Brian a bit - especially since Freddie had only just returned from the infirmary and Roger had been caught with drugs not too long ago. Either Queen Mary’s data communication was not up to date, or they had deliberately chosen to remove some discriminating information - especially the former of the two options seemed most likely to happen to Brian. ‘One of you has done exceptionally well lately, however, and that’s you, John.’

Four pairs of eyes turned to meet those of John, whose were large in surprise. ‘Me?’

‘Yes, Leonard is very happy about your recent talkativeness and willingness to talk to him, and about always showing up. Jasper says the same about your behaviour during group discussions,’ Nolan beamed to a nearly empty looking John, who stared at him as if he had no idea what he was talking of. Brian understood what Nolan was getting at; John indeed had been going to all his sessions recently, and seemed more interactive than before during the depression talk group hours. That this was a talkativeness he only shared with Brian was something Jasper conveniently seemed to have forgotten, Brian thought dimly.

‘And what is the big news then?’ Roger asked eagerly, and Nolan’s smile broadened.

‘The big news, then, is that John will be acquitted from Queen Mary’s for having improved his mental condition, and will be allowed to go home.’

 _John acquitted. Home. John was allowed to go home!_ Deep inside Brian had known all along that John would be sent released instead of being sent to a long-stay clinic after having completed his two year cycle at Queen Mary’s, but to actually hear that his partner would be free from this living hell - and whatever other terrible places resembling this one were out there - was the big relief Brian had waited for to hear for so long. John would be allowed to leave; he would be allowed to go home, return to his friends and school and work and the rest of the life he had to give up upon being admitted into Queen Mary’s, and start building his future again. He would leave all of this shit behind; the dreadfully unmotivated depression talk group each morning, the canteen fights, the meetings with his trashy psychiatrist, queueing for medicines every evening, random drug searches, not being allowed to even own a pencil or shave his facial hair without the supervision of a staff member out of fear that something bad would happen. He’d be allowed to live his life again, and soon enough, Brian hoped, with the motivation of John being out there waiting for him, he would be allowed to leave, too.

When Brian turned to John to see how he was taking in the news he knew for a fact none of them had anticipated, he saw his boyfriend staring at the messenger with a look of emptiness on his face.

‘I don’t understand.’

John’s words were quiet but not entirely unexpected; Brian could understand that such big news would be hard to grasp and take in all at once, and Nolan luckily understood this, too. He was calm and supporting as ever when he said: ‘I know it’s a lot to take in all at once. I’ll be in tomorrow to discuss some of the particulars with you, sign some paperwork and all. But that’s nothing to worry about now. Now it’s time to celebrate that you’ll be free!’ Nolan said in a cheerful tone that Freddie was quick to pick up on.

‘John, darling, oh my God! This is such good news! You’ll be allowed to leave!’ Freddie cried in an enthusiasm that was uncommon even to him, and which only seemed to work to make Brian even more enthusiastic than he had been before. The longer he thought about it, the better the idea of John being allowed to go home  was the best news Nolan possibly could have brought; better even, it felt to Brian, than if Nolan had told him he was allowed to go himself. He supposed this was because he loved John with all of his heart and all of his soul, and the well-being of John weighed heavier than that of himself - something that became all the more apparent in situations like these.

‘Finally leave this shitty place behind after nearly two years!’ Roger added with a well-meant slap to John’s upper arm, but one which John did not take so lightly as he pulled his arm away from Roger’s reach. He seemed tense, and was obviously completely overwhelmed by the news he had received.

‘There must be a mistake of some sort,’ John concluded, but Nolan shook his head violently.

‘No, John, it’s true. I was there myself when it was decided. I was in favour of the plan, and Jasper and Nolan and Gracie from the file room all agreed that you have made so much progress lately. The sessions, the discussions with your psychiatrist, you making friends - more than friends, Nolan added with a sideways nod towards Brian. ‘You’ve made so much progress over the course of the last months, and it’s time to reward you for it. You’ll be allowed to go home and will only have to attend weekly meetings with a psychiatrist. Isn’t that amazing?’

‘It’s the best news we’ve ever heard!’ Brian said on behalf of John, who gazed at Nolan as if he was the first person he’d ever seen. Brian, however, could no longer contain his excitement, and turned to John to throw his arms around him in the tightest hug he’d ever held him in.

‘Brian-’ John called his name, but Brian just smiled as he buried his face in the crook of John’s neck.

‘Honey, you have no idea how proud I am of you! I knew you could do this, I knew you’d be released sooner or later!’

John didn’t answer; instead, he tried his best to wriggle free from his partner’s embrace. When this didn’t have the desired effect, he asked more than a little agitated: ‘Let go of me, will you?’

‘What’s the matter, Deaks?’ Roger asked. ‘You’ve just gotten the best news of the world!’

‘It’s not,’ said John as he wriggled himself out of the grip of his partner with a force that Brian personally considered unnecessary, and he was forced to take a step back from John. He felt his upper arm burning from the power with which John had removed him from his body, and he looked at his partner in an attempt to see what was going on in his mind. John didn’t look at him, though; he avoided the stares of all four people around him, and seemed focussed only on digging his fingernails into the palm of his hand.

‘What are you talking about?’ Roger asked with a frown. Brian could only imagine how much he wanted to leave Queen Mary’s behind, and how strange it must be for him to witness Roger being so cool about being told the news that was every patient’s dream.

‘Is it because Brian won’t be allowed to go with you?’ Freddie guessed. ‘Because honestly, he’ll be there with you before you know it. You being allowed to go will be such an incentive for Brian to do his very best to recover and leave, too. Won’t it, Brian? Nolan?’

‘Absolutely,’ Brian agreed without skipping a breath. Stepping closer, he gently took hold of John’s arm as to show physical closeness without being too much in-your-face about it, and said: ‘Darling, I’ll be there with you before you know it, I promise. You’ll be able to go back home and settle yourself into normal life again before I’ll come to join you. Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that exactly what we talked of the other day?’ Brian reminded him.

Surprisingly, John answered with a soft and nearly vulnerable: ‘I don’t want to go home.’

Before Brian could either mentally or physically react to this, Roger piped up from the sideline: ‘How can you say that?! Half of Queen Mary’s patients would kill to be allowed to leave his burning hellfire, and you say you don’t want to leave?’

John’s eyes held an ice cold glow when he looked at Roger. ‘I’m not half of Queen Mary’s. I don’t want to go home,’ he nearly hissed at his roommate, who lifted an indignant eyebrow that only seemed to create more resistance in John. Brian knew he had to come between the two before this moment of triumph would turn into a disaster scene, and he turned to his partner once more.

‘Hey, John, look at me. Look at me please,’ he bade, and when his partner didn’t listen, he used his one unoccupied hand to turn John’s cheek towards him. John was quick to pull away from his fingers, and looked at Brian with a hint of distrust which Brian, bent on soothing him into reason again, decided to ignore for the time being. ‘Look, you’re just a little overwhelmed and upset because you’ll be leaving the place you’ve made friends and the place you’ve come to call home. But this place isn’t home. This isn’t where you belong. You belong out there in society, with all your friends and family at your side.’

It seemed as if the mentioning of friends and family triggered something in John; as if it was the last raw to break the calm he had until then managed to keep up, only to lash out against Brian properly this time. ‘I’m not afraid or overwhelmed! I don’t want to go home! I can’t go home, don’t you understand?’ John’s voice had raised to a level where it could be described as shouting, and Brian blinked in confusion. John had never raised his voice at him like this, and he was too starstruck to come up with something sensible to say for the time being. This, in turn, gave the floor back to John, who told him with renewed determination: ‘I don’t want to leave and I want you to let go of me.’

‘But honey-’ Brian tried to no avail.

‘Stop calling me that. I want you to let go of me.’

Brian looked at his partner with a mixture of doubt, misunderstanding, and hope - but was met with nothing but emptiness from John’s side. Understanding that he wasn’t going to get anywhere while Nolan, Freddie, and Roger were staring at the interaction unfolding in front of them, Brian resorted to trying: ‘Maybe we’ll go and have a word in private, won’t we, John? Find a place for just us two.’ Freddie nodded and Nolan verbally approved of this idea, but John was having none of it.

‘There’s nothing to talk about. I want to be left alone,’ John said, which to Brian seemed like the worst wish he could possibly give in to right now. It was obvious that the news of being acquitted from Queen Mary’s had upset John, and since none of them could figure out a direct reason for this, it seemed the best idea for Brian to sit down and talk to him in private. He hated to see John upset, afraid, or gloomy at the prospect of a future that was just opening up for him, and he wanted to do all that was within his might to help him feel better. It was just more than a bit of a shame that John didn’t seem to see this.

‘I’m not leaving you alone now. You seem upset and I want to know what’s wrong,’ Brian said - pleaded, more like, by now - but it seemed to bring him nowhere.

‘Just because, okay?’ John said, trying to pull his arm away from Brian’s hold and uttering a frustrated and repetitive: ‘Now let go of me!’ when his boyfriend seemed to have no intentions of removing his grip from him anywhere soon.

‘Not before you tell me what’s wrong. Come, we’ll go somewhere private, just the two of us, but you’re not leaving before you’ve told me what’s wrong,’ Brian stated as he grabbed hold of John’s wrist just as his partner had managed to manoeuvre his upper arm out of his grip. For a moment he felt triumphant, and he tugged John closer to him in an attempt to show him that he would not his partner walk out on him in a state of obvious hidden pain, but this soon turned out to be a mistake. He did not know whether he heard the blow first or if he felt it, whether Freddie screamed his name before the event or after it, and whether he tasted the iron-like taste of blood or if he just imagined this. What he did know for sure was that John’s fist had connected with his face - his knuckles against his left cheekbone, the lower side of his balled-up hand with his jawbone - and that in the aftermath of the sickening sound and hot red pain exploding all over the left side of his face, he’d lost grip of John’s wrist. The slap had been powerful enough to nearly knock him over, but just not yet. Nevertheless, it took him a few seconds to get back to himself - a few seconds in which total chaos seemed to erupt around him.

‘John!’ Freddie mewled with pure horror in his voice. ‘What on earth!’

‘How could you _do_ that?!’ Roger added, and Brian felt a hand landing on his shoulder, an arm around his body pulling him closer. He didn’t know whether it was Freddie’s, Roger’s, or Nolan’s - all he could focus on was the dizziness he felt, the throbbing pain, the taste of blood in his mouth. He was rather positive by now that he was not making it up, as it felt too real, the warmth of the blood spilling from his lips or the inside of his cheek or whatever it was. The entire left side of his face felt as if it had been hit by a freight train. In fact, he felt as if it would have been less painful had a freight train run over his cheek- and jawbone; less painful than having his partner slap him in the face.

The three witnesses of the unexpected act of violence were still fussing around Brian, shouting at John in a useless attempt to get to the core of his motifs for the unexpected action, but their voices were bleak to Brian’s ears. All he could put his limited focus towards was the indistinct silhouette of his partner, who seemed to have cowered a few steps back from him since he had landed a fist against the side of his face. Between the dizziness and one half-shut eye, Brian could not see his facial expression or his exact pattern of movement, but he seemed to be moving away from him still one way or the other.

‘You left me no choice,’ John choked out, before he turned around and disappeared through the hallway Brian and he had previously emerged from together.


	15. Part Fifteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello naughty children, it's Clinic time again! It's been a few weeks so I'm black with an update on what happened after John punched Brian in the face and left him standing there, basically. Sorry for that *cries* 
> 
> Anyway, I promised some more backstory for John, so I hope this chapter will give you guys some insight. Have fun reading, and please let me know what you think of it!
> 
> Thanks to @vampireluph for proofreading!

**The Clinic Pt. 15**

Despite the positively overwhelming blow against his cheekbone he had endured at the hand of his partner, Brian was quick to recover both physically and mentally. That was - an ice pack which had been nearly forcibly bestowed upon him by Nolan, who’d rushed down to the infirmary and had insisted that he would not go anywhere without having it pressed against his cheek, relieved the burning of the side of his face. The blood he’d tasted on his tongue he had decided to swallow, fearing that Freddie would not stop fussing over him within now and five business days if he showed that John might have knocked his cheek into the sharp edges of his teeth, or his teeth out of its place, or whatever it was that was causing the mild blood flow. Careful and hopefully unseen examination with his tongue against the painful area did not point to any dislodgement, so Brian hoped nothing serious had happened there. Even if it had, he would not be the one to admit so now, and have an ever-concerned Freddie and an ever-pissed off Roger drag him over to the infirmary. He would not allow it  - not now that he had something a lot more pressing on his mind.

The entire event still seemed to have happened too quickly, too swift for Brian to fully take in the both the meaning of the news Nolan had brought them and all the emotions and actions it had unlocked. He remembered having spent time with John at the sad excuse of a gym, having walked back to collect the rest of their roommates, and Nolan popping up from out of nowhere to share the news of John being allowed to go home. It was something Brian was positive none of them had anticipated, but news that had been exciting to all of them apart from the only one person to whom it should come as the best news of his life. John, of whom he had expected to be ecstatic after being given the news that he’d be allowed to leave the place they all loathed so much, had been everything but happy to hear of his dismissal. At first it had seemed positively impossible to Brian to feel anything else but joy and relief upon hearing one would be released from Queen Mary’s and all that came with living in the confined world of a mental health ward, but he soon understood that John might not be too happy to leave him behind. He had finally found someone to love, someone to confide in, and having to leave him behind at the place they both positively abhorred was not something he seemed to be comfortable with.

The thought of John not wanting to leave him behind had made Brian’s heart flutter at first, but when the consolation that he’d offered by telling John he’d be out there with him before he knew it did not work and John seemed to want to close himself off to any human interaction, Brian had started to doubt himself and John. His attitude towards Queen Mary’s had been negative from the start - he found it time and time again to be a terrible place with a dreadful population and meddling, incompetent staff - but yet he didn’t want to leave. At the time of hearing the exciting news and John dismissing it Brian had not seen any valid reason for his negativity towards being allowed to leave, but now he realised that no matter how bad a situation was, if the alternative was worse, one would naturally be inclined to hold on to what one had. John must somehow be convinced that going back home would be worse than staying at Queen Mary’s, and therefore he preferred to remain where he was. This idea tied in perfectly with John repetitively telling them that he couldn’t go home, and with his frustration when no one seemed to understand his point and instead pushed on to the fact that he should be happy he would be allowed to leave behind this entire circus. That it was a privilege that he was allowed to leave - but how could leaving be a privilege to someone who apparently faced a worse fate than remaining at Queen Mary’s? How could they judge for someone else to be happy with a decision they would be happy with, but which could leave the person afflicted in a situation worse than he was in at the moment? How could they push their hopes and wishes on John when clearly he’d needed them to be silent and listen to him?

‘Do you think it’ll bruise, Nolan?’

Brian was distracted from his own thoughts by Freddie, who - still pacing around in the hallway nervously - asked Nolan his anxious questions every now and then. Between the indignant comments from Roger and the questions Nolan asked to examine the pain level Brian was feeling, there had been a lot of silence, confusion, and anger in the air. Brian estimated that it must have been some five minutes ago since John had walked out on them after having delivered a blow to his face that had made his cheek swell and his vision go blurry, and he could swear he could feel a headache coming up. Whether this was a result of the slap directly, or of the stress and fear he was going through since he had not been allowed to go after John, was something he could not tell. The only thing he did know was that he would not admit out loud that he felt like he might need an ibuprofen or two, as this would only be taken as another reason for Freddie and Nolan to keep fussing around him, and for Roger to make more hateful comments towards John.

‘It’ll definitely bruise,’ Nolan commented, carefully lifting the ice pack from his patient’s cheek for a moment. ‘I’m just unsure whether it’ll be on the cheekbone, the cheek itself, or the jawbone. The entire area is red and swollen at the moment, so I can’t really see which spot has been inflicted most. Therefore I can’t tell as of yet where and how much it’ll bruise, or for how long it’ll last.’ The ice pack was shifted and pressed against Brian’s face again, and he grunted.

‘How much longer…’ he asked, but he soon understood his question was drowned out by Freddie, who made another dramatic comment he was tired of hearing.

‘I can’t believe _John_ would do this to you, out of all people!’ Freddie cried, and Brian sighed. Freddie had made comments similar to this at least ten times before, and he wished he would stop. He meant well, without a doubt, but this did not make anything better - and neither did the angry comment Roger added to it.

‘When he gets back tonight he’d better fucking apologise to you on his bare knees, or he’ll have to find another place to sleep.’

‘He won’t come back tonight,’ Brian mumbled, which at last turned all heads towards him.

‘What do you mean?’ Freddie asked, eyes large and curious.

‘As I said. He won’t come back until we go and look for him,’ Brian repeated, turning his face away when Nolan turned the ice pack around to put the colder side against his cheekbone.

Roger snorted at the mere idea. ‘We’re not gonna run after him and beg him for forgiveness when _he_ was the one who hit _you_ in the face. We’ll be here for when he’s ready to come back and apologise, and that’s all the reaching out we’re gonna be doing.’

‘But that’s the entire _point_ ,’ Brian said. ‘He won’t come back unless we go to get him and talk to him. He needs to know that we understand him and still love him despite what he did.’

‘Understand?’ Roger repeated. ‘I don’t understand why he hit you in the face, and I’m not gonna fucking act like I do either.’

‘I don’t _need_ you to anyway,’ Brian said with a touch of arrogance he detected in his own voice - something he wasn’t exactly proud of, but he was not in the mood to go into that for too much at the time being. ‘I understand why he did it, and I’ll go after him,’ Brian said - something that again seemed to make sure all eyes were glued on him.

‘You understand?’ Freddie asked after a considerable silence.

‘It was self-defence. None of us listened to him when he told us he didn’t want to leave Queen Mary’s because he can’t go home, and I got into his personal space when he told me to leave him alone. I brought this onto myself,’ Brian explained. He was starting to understand and acknowledge his role in the situation that had driven John to violently move him out of the way, but as he did, Roger seemed to be leaning the other way more and more.

‘It’s not self-defence when you hit someone who forms no threat to you at all in the face,’ Roger said.

‘But what if I did form a threat to him?’ Brian asked him sharply. ‘I grabbed his arm and didn’t back off when he told me to. He obviously experienced that as a threat.’

‘Then maybe he should stop being a cry-baby and deal with things like any normal person would. I can’t believe this place is letting a psychopath go free but keep us locked up.’

This last comment of Roger was what broke Brian’s calm and patience. He grabbed the ice pack and brought it down from his cheek with a bit more force than necessary, and slipped past a concerned looking Nolan to corner Roger against the wall he had been leaning against.

‘You take that back. You don’t call John a psychopath when you know nothing about him or his past.’

There was a hint of insecurity in Roger’s eyes at first when Brian, who was almost a head taller than he was, towered over him, but then he just snorted and crossed his arms. ‘And how could I know anything, when he never bloody tells anybody anything.’

‘He tells _me_ things,’ Brian corrected him. ‘It’s why I know he feels guiltier than he’s ever done before for hitting me, and why he needs us now more than ever. Needs _me_ more than ever. So I don’t care what you, or Freddie, or Nolan or anybody in this godforsaken place thinks about me going off to find him and talk to him. I know him better than all of you combined, and I know he needs me now.’

‘If you know him so well, then why did you let it come to a point where he had to hit you in the face because you wouldn’t listen?’ The tone of Roger’s voice was taunting, but Brian decided to ignore it.

‘Because I now realise something we were all too self-absorbed with to realise before.’

‘And what would that be?’ The jeering smile was still there, but Brian was not in the mood to play games, and especially not with someone who failed to see that John needed help now more than ever.

‘That John wasn’t being dramatic or caught by surprise or whatever when he said that he could not go home. He was being serious.’

‘Why can’t he go home?’ Freddie asked from behind him. Brian turned around to face both him and Nolan, and eventually took a step away from Roger after having given him a glare he hoped would help Roger realise he needed to stay in his lane for the time being.

‘That’s what I’m about to find out,’ Brian said. Walking towards Nolan and holding up his hand, he asked: ‘Can I have that ice pack? I’ll manage from now off.’

Nolan seemed a hint sceptical, but handed over the tool anyway. ‘Keep it against your cheek for at least another ten minutes or so. Do you want me to go with you?’

Brian shook his head. ‘But please stay on guard in case he… you know, did things to himself.’

The expression on Nolan’s face went from questioning to grim but serious in all but half a second. ‘I’ll be in the infirmary if you need me.’

‘What’s going on?’ Freddie asked, his glance lingering between the nurse and his friend. ‘Did I miss something here?’

It was only then that Brian realised that neither Freddie nor Roger, and probably no one else apart from him and a few medical professionals at Queen Mary’s, knew of John’s past in self-harm. The realisation of this made Brian all the more determined that he was the one to go after John out of everybody at this place - just in case this hadn’t been clear to him for whatever reason - and that he really was the one John had entrusted with more information than anyone else he’d ever encountered at Queen Mary’s. If there was anyone John would be willing to talk to concerning the reasons why he could not go home upon his dismissal from Queen Mary’s, it would be him.

 _Something he didn’t bother telling you_ , was what Brian wished he could say with an extra long and intense look in Roger’s direction, but he decided that this was not the best time to rile everybody up against each other. They needed each other, the protection and the feeling of safety only they could give each other, even now that they did not agree on what to do. Perhaps it was especially now that they did not agree on what to do that they needed each other’s support most.

‘Something he might tell you somewhere in the near future if you let him in when he’s most vulnerable,’ Brian opted for instead, and which both Freddie and Roger nodded quietly. Brian did not have to explain that by letting him in he meant not so much into the room and into his own bed when he came back tonight, but into their _hearts_.

‘Go on, darling. Talk to John. He needs you.’

Freddie’s voice sounded choked up, and Brian had to blink against the tears as he nodded at him - a battle he almost lost when Roger added some more words of support.

‘Go get him. We’ll be in our room when you, or he, or both of you need us.’

Brian nodded and all but stumbled out of the hallway.

 

# # #

 

Once he’d moved away from the topic of convincing everybody he had to go and talk to John to actually going out to find him and talk to him, Brian found himself wondering where his partner could be. The weather was still poor and it was unlikely he’d go to their room, or any other public place where people were likely to see him. He would find himself someplace quiet, somewhere he ran the smallest risks of anybody finding him out - which ruled out the library and the laundry room as well, as small groups of people would often pop into these rooms to find themselves a quiet spot other than their own bedroom. It had to be somewhere more closed off, somewhere no one else would think about-

The bathroom near the entrance to the backyard. The one so far remote from all dorm rooms, public areas, and offices that no one ever seemed to make use of it. Brian was positive many people did not even know it was there; and the ones that did avoided it as the plague, as the place was known as the last resort of a dubious suicide case.

The place Jimmy had hung himself.

Brian had no doubt in his mind that this was the only place in the entire building he had to go to to find his partner, but at the same time it was also the most dreadful place he could possibly have to go to. He could still see the lifeless body hanging from the ceiling; could still see the empty look on Jimmy’s pale face before he had stumbled away from the bathroom he had never since dared to enter. The place he never would have entered again if it had not been for John - but since everything he ever did was for the benefit of John, he did not hesitate to make his way over to the site of catastrophe.

It must have been half past five, perhaps a little closer to six, for the first people had already gathered in the canteen for the upcoming dinner. Supper was the last thing on Brian’s mind for the time being; the only thing he wished for was that no one would see him as he skipped past the canteen with its floor-to-ceiling windows. Unfortunately, it seemed to be the hurry with which he tried to make his way past the patients that caught the attention of some - that, in combination with the ice pack he kept against his face in an attempt not to be recognised.

‘Brian! What’s up with you?’

A familiar voice called out and a hand was placed on his shoulder, forcing him to drop his pace. Brian turned around with a heavy sigh to meet the sceptical faces of Eli and Paul of his depression talk group, who were just about the last people he felt like talking to at the time being. They had a reputation of gossiping, and he knew that if he let them in on the situation, the story would have reached everyone inside the building before curfew that night.

‘Nothing. Walked into a door,’ Brian lied, but neither of the two men seemed to believe him.

‘Was that door’s name Drew, perhaps?’ Paul snorted, which earned him a poke against his ribcage from Eli, who at last made himself useful for Brian’s cause.

‘Drew’s in isolation. Feel free to have another guess, but without me,’ Brian said grimly, after which he spun around and left the par behind. He heard one of them call his name, attaching something that sounded like an apology, but he did not care about any of it for the time being. He had wasted enough time as it was, and finding his partner - preferably without anyone stringing along with him - was the only cause he cared for at the time being. He knew John and he had made a promise concerning self-harming, but he had seemed so beside himself when he’d heard the news that had made his entire world come crashing down, that Brian was not sure if he would stick to it still. He quickened his pace, and prayed to whoever or whatever was up in the skies that John had not resorted to self-mutilation - and in case he had, that it was not too late yet.

The hallway was empty and deserted apart from a warden who seemed to be dozing at his desk as a form of guarding the back entrance of the building, and who sure as hell did not pay attention to Brian as he entered the corridor from the opposite side. He halted at the door of the room he wished he’d never have to enter again after having seen it turn into a scene of disaster, and which possibly could become once more a resort of hopelessness. His hand lay trembling on the doorknob and he knew that every second he wasted now could be one he would regret later, but he could not push himself to open the door yet. The images of the corpse hanging from the ceiling, the makeshift rope attached to the ceiling light and the stillness of the body of a person who he’d sat next to and talked to a mere day before the discovery - it was imprinted on his vision, and if he was to see John in any sort of condition similar to the one in which Jimmy had ended up-

No. That would not happen. John would never do that - not to himself, and most of all not to Brian. They’d made a promise, for God’s sake; a promise they would not harm themselves. John knew how the fate of Jimmy haunted his partner every night and day, and would never put him through the terror of witnessing any of that again. More than that, he would not throw their future away - he would not risk their future together for anything in the world. John had sad himself that all he wanted after Queen Mary’s was a future together with him, and Brian was here to secure him that this vision would still hold. He was not going to leave John for the world, regardless of whether one of them would be send back into society or not. He would fight to be able to leave Queen Mary’s, fight to be dismissed and reunited with John; and he was going to tell him that he’d be there for him through it all regardless of what had just passed between them. Brian was determined to pull through this together even if it was the last thing he’d do.

With this thought in mind, Brian pressed down the door handle and pushed open the door, taking in a deep breath as he stepped over the threshold. He hardly dared to open his eyes, the vision of the corpse plastered across his mind now more than ever - but to his relief, and perhaps as a confirmation of his common sense, there was nothing out of the ordinary to see in the bathroom. No bodies, no ropes coming down from the ceiling light; no scenes belonging to horror stories but which occasionally would make their entrance into Queen Mary’s. There was nothing to be seen but a sterile white room, poorly lit by one overhead light bulb that seemed to have replaced the iron framework of the previous light constellation for obvious reasons. Three iron wash basins were attached to the left side of the room in front of a dusty mirror that vaguely reflected Brian’s silhouette from the corner of his eyes, and the opposite side held three separate toilet cabins. He did not even have to check and see that one of them was locked; in the complete silence of the white tiled room, the ragged breathing of his partner through the thin triplex door of the middle toilet cabin was all Brian needed to hear to know that his suspicions had been well-founded.

‘John?’

The name of his boyfriend came out as little more than a squeak, but Brian could tell John heard it when after one soft sniff all sound faded. Of course John did not want him to hear him cry; he always had difficulty showing his feelings to anybody, and this specific moment was going to be no exception. The fact that the walls were crumbling down did not mean that John was not going to employ all that was in his might to try and keep them up for as long as he could.

The sound of Brian’s shoes made a nearly clattering sound on the tiled floor as he walked towards the cabin, breaking the silence John was imposing upon himself. ‘It’s Brian. I know you’re there.’

Another sniff followed, but otherwise no sign of life from John’s side was shown. Brian could hear the difficulty in breathing, and the idea of his partner, eyes red with tears a mere metre away from him yet so far away from the embrace Brian wished to offer him, felt like the biggest bridge Brian had ever had to cross. Physically they were so close, but the mental distance he had to disclose to get John back into his arms again felt like a thousand miles.

‘Please open the door, or at least talk to me,’ Brian begged silently when another thirty seconds of silence followed.

‘There’s nothing to _say_.’ Brian’s heart made a leap of happiness when his boyfriend finally spoke to him, but the words he said and the tone in which he spoke were no cause for joy at all. His partner sounded choked up, his voice was drenched in tears, and Brian could not even imagine in what sort of state he must be. John had never cried in his presence, and the closest he’d ever come to letting him in on his troubles and emotions had in fact been earlier that afternoon, when he’d talked of the guilt he felt following the accident of his younger sister. Brian had never seen him in a state of real grief and despair the way John had seen him - but he had a feeling that today might be the first time he would get to see John like that, and he knew he had to stand strong and be there for him.

‘There is so much to say. Too much to say,’ Brian said calmly. ‘I’m sorry for pushing so much when you clearly weren’t happy about being dismissed from Queen Mary’s. I’m sorry for grabbing you by the arm when you told me to leave you alone. I should have listened to you- and that’s why I’m here. To listen to you.’

There was silence again, a sniff, and a cough, before the same choked-up voice told him: ‘I don’t deserve that.’

‘Don’t deserve what?’ Brian asked softly.

‘Your kindness when I literally- I _hit_ you in the face.’ John’s voice was as small as Brian had ever heard it, and it made his heart sink in his chest. He knew that John felt guilty over the incident, and although every other person at Queen Mary’s might be of the opinion that it had been abusive behaviour and that Brian had every right to be angry at him, Brian knew that the mental strain the incident was putting on John was far larger than any physical pain he ever could have caused him to feel with a slap of his fist. It was not like John to hurt anyone, most of all not on purpose, and Brian knew that just having to live with the knowledge of having hurled his fist at him in a moment of anger and misunderstanding was punishment enough for John.

‘It’s no big deal,’ Brian said, ignoring the pain in his jawbone, which for some reason decided to start throbbing again just as he spoke of it. ‘I forgive you, John, a thousand times over.’

‘But I don’t forgive myself,’ John said. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for hurting you. You’re the only one I’ve ever loved, _really_ loved, and I- why do I always _ruin_ everything?’

Even though Brian knew John was fighting hard to hold back the tears, he no longer managed, and soft sobbing filled the bathroom. The sound was heart-breaking, and Brian wished he could tear down the door that stood between them just to hug John, just to hug him and tell him everything was going to be alright. However, fearing that kicking down a door would shock John in his current state of emotional fragility _and_ would probably disgruntle the overworked staff of Queen Marys even more than before, Brian decided to use words instead to come closer to John.

‘You don’t ruin anything. Honey, believe me when I tell you you haven’t ruined-’

‘ _You must hate me now_.’

The voice was feeble yet insistent, and Brian let his back bump up against the wall behind him and buried his face in his hands. For a moment he was thankful for the door separating the pair of them for each other, because he was afraid that John seeing him like this - sloping down against the wall, forehead in his hands, right side of his face red and swollen - would only make him feel more guilty than how he obviously felt already. He wanted to scream, wanted to tear down that door, shake John’s shoulders, and tell him to open his fucking eyes and see Brian loved him more than anyone in the world, but all he could do was pull himself together enough to ask: ‘Would I be here if I hated you? Or even if I was just angry at you and didn’t want to see you for a moment?’

Silence filled the room again, and Brian was inclined to repeat his question when at last an answer followed, albeit not the one he had hoped for.

‘You should hate me. It’s what I deserve.’

Now it was Brian’s time to feel tears pricking behind his eyes - because this was by far the saddest thing he’d ever heard John say. More than that, it was the falsest thing he’d ever heard his partner say, because there was no way Brian would ever hate him, let alone that he would deserve to be hated. John deserved all the love in the world, and the fact that he could not see this himself was something that could keep Brian up at night.

‘I’ll never hate you, John,’ Brian choked out. ‘You deserve all the love in the world and I want to give it to you, but I can only do that when you _let_ me.’

Brian had never thought that out of all the possible things he could have said, these in the end were going to be the ones that would grant him access to John again. Just as he hung his head and expected the tears to roll down his cheeks, the soft but distinctive click! of a lock announced that the door between them had been opened up, and Brian did not hesitate to look up. When he saw indeed that the little red panel of the lock had traded places with a green one, he stepped forwards, ran a the back of his hand over his nose (momentarily uncareful with his cheekbone, and he hissed through clenched teeth when his hand came in touch with the sore area). The pain was soon forgotten however when John pushed open the door slightly to grant him access, and Brian was over to the toilet cabin in all but three strides. He swung open the door and was met with the sight of a teary John with swollen eyes and matching red, puffy cheeks, and Brian did not hesitate a single second to step inside the small, cramped room and clasp his arms around the torso of John, who instantly lost the composure he seemed to have built up again, and buried his face in Brian’s chest before letting the tears run free again. Heavy sobs overtook his body, and Brian pressed him as close to his own body as the molecules between then would allow them.

For a minute or so there was nothing but tears and attempts at apologies which were overpowered by simultaneous crying and Brian’s attempts at hushing his partner, who clung to him as if his life depended on it. Brian felt his heart sink when he realised that at this point, John probably really did feel like he was the only thing left in his life since the news that would take life as he knew it away from him, and plunge him into what to him felt to be an abyss of darkness.

‘I’m so- so fucking _sorry_ ,’ John hiccupped between long-drawn sobs, and Brian ran a hand over his hair in an attempt at soothing him.

‘It’s okay, baby. Nothing’s the matter,’ Brian whispered.

‘There is! I hurt you, and I- I’ll never forgive myself for it.’

Brian, pressing John closer, said: ‘You should. It’s nothing, really. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.’

John carefully detached himself from Brian in order to inspect him. Brian had forgotten that, while embracing his partner, he had left the by now melting ice pack in the arm he’d wrapped around John’s torso, meaning that the afflicted spot had not been cooled properly for the last couple of minutes, and more than that, for the period of time Nolan had marked out as being necessary to reduce swelling and bruising. Although Brian was sure the bruises were going to be a little while, he could tell that the swelling was still visible simply by hearing the gasp John emitted upon the sight of it, and the tears that filled his eyes again.

‘Oh God, Brian. I’m so sorry,’ John whispered, one hand clamped over his nose and mouth. ‘I don’t- don’t know what came over me.’

‘You were just overwhelmed. The news of having to leave Queen Mary’s and everybody pushing you to believe that this was good news when to you it wasn’t good news at all… Because it really isn’t, right?’ Brian asked him. John averted his eyes and shook his head gloomily. ‘It’s not just as matter of having gotten used to life here, and not wanting to leave me or Freddie and Roger behind.’

John snorted, and stared right past Brian as he said: ‘I wish having to miss people would be the biggest problem in leaving here.’

Brian paused for a second, and then asked the question that had been on his mind all the while. ‘What are you afraid of will happen when you return home?’

It seemed as if the mere mentioning of the concept of home turned John cold and distant - as he had been upon having been told the news of the staff’s decision to let him go. ‘I can’t go home, Brian.’

‘I know, honey. I know,’ Brian tried to soothe him, but it seemed to have the opposite effect on John.

‘No, you _don’t_ know,’ John snapped - which Brian soon understood originated out of helplessness towards the dire situation his life was spiralling into, and not from the question he had posed him - when John added: ‘You know I can’t, but you don’t know how- how bad it is.’

‘Then tell me,’ Brian encouraged him softly. ‘But only if you want to.’

John took a deep breath and stared at the white tiles next to his feet, using a rough gesture of his hand to wipe away the tears from his face. ‘I don’t know where to start.’

‘It goes down deep, doesn’t it? Deep into your youth?’ Brian asked. John just nodded again. He looked doubtful for a moment - doubtful not so much of whether he should tell Brian, but where on earth indeed he should start. Brian had a feeling that a long story was about to be dug up after a long time of cropping it all up, and began to think that finding themselves in self-imposed retreat into a literal toilet stall might not be so bad after all, given that the sink and paper towels would be just nearby in case of a breakdown of tears that Brian had a feeling was going to happen sooner or later.

‘Did it start with the accident of your sister?’ Brian asked - encouraging him to share his story, but hopefully in a way that would not come across as threatening or invasive to John. He was not exactly hoping for a repeat performance of what had gone down earlier - and not even for the sake of his face, but the sake of John’s emotional wellbeing.

‘No,’ John sniffed. ‘That was a result of how bad it had gotten already.’

‘What had gotten so bad?’ Brian asked. In an attempt to create a more private atmosphere, he swiftly turned around to lock the door of the bathroom stall behind them for what it was worth; it was not as if anyone was going to be walking in on them anyway. No one ever made use of this bathroom that, as it seemed, therefore also hadn’t been cleaned since the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and seeing as the guard at the other side of the hallway hadn’t stirred upon John’s crying at first, Brian assumed he would not wake up now either. It was more to create a feeling of safety and privacy for John, who was blinking heavily against the tears they both realised would come spilling down sooner or later anyway.

‘My parents.’

‘Their marriage?’ Brian asked, reaching over to bring down the toilet seat and carefully guiding John to sit down on it. He himself crouched down in front of him, which the small space of the bathroom would only just allow. If anyone somehow was to walk in on this compromising-looking position right now Brian knew they had some explaining to do, but he could care less about whatever the world around them was doing. At this particular moment nothing existed apart from John and him, existing in a small vacuum of time and space which Brian hoped would finally allow his partner to come clean and let him in on his problems and fears so that he could help him, or at the very least stand by him.

‘Not even that, but- their parenting. Their involvement and engagement with their family.’

‘How did that happen?’ Brian whispered.

‘My older brother,’ John answered in a squeak that was hardly audible, and Brian had to pause for a moment to make sure he’d understood his boyfriend’s reply correctly. He had never heard John speak of an older brother before, but something was telling him that whatever sort of role this older sibling played in his life, it had been a heavy one - and he would soon turn out to have been right.

‘I didn’t know you had an older brother?’ Brian half-asked, half-said.

‘I never told you because don’t have one anymore. He died when he was six.’ John averted his face, and Brian was left to take in this new information concerning John’s life on his own. Never could he have guessed that such a family drama would be hidden behind the walls his lover had put up around himself, and even though he figured John must have been young when he lost this particular family member, he had a feeling that the event of the death must have left a huge impact on him in the long run.

‘John, I’m so sorry,’ was all Brian eventually managed to tell his company.

It’s okay. I don’t remember any of it, I was two when it happened. He caught a bad case of pneumonia, and only lasted a few days when he was admitted into the hospital,’ John said - he sounded surprisingly put-together, but Brian feared that this was emotional numbness more than anything. ‘My parents were broken, of course, and they never really got over it. But instead of becoming very protective or sheltering or anything, they swung the other way. They became very off-hand and didn’t seem to want to become attached to me, or my sister, when she was born. I remember the midwife trying to convince my mum to hold Julie, but she refused.’ John paused to remove a few straying tears from his cheeks, leaving Brian to drink in the mental image of a mother refusing to hold her new-born child. He tried to find something to say, but it turned out harder than expected. As the only son of a pair overly concerned and sheltering parents, he could hardly imagine what it must be like to be neglected by the very people who brought you into the world - and John picked up the story before he managed to come up with anything useful to say in response. 

‘She became very absent, and my father- he became depressed. Didn’t want to leave the bedroom, didn’t talk for days at time. He’d just- sit there at the kitchen table with that empty look in his eyes,’ John said, shaking his head lightly to himself as he obviously recalled the image of it.

‘Did he… you know, get any professional help in the end?’ Brian asked hopefully, but he had a feeling that this would be too much to ask for.

‘It was the early fifties. Men didn’t have depressions. And even if there wouldn’t be that social stigma, he still wouldn’t have gone to a doctor or psychiatrist. He wouldn’t have wanted to- he wanted nothing apart from locking himself up in his room. I can’t even remember ever having seen him happy, or even- even genuinely smile all those years,’ John said gloomily. Brian could only imagine what the effect of an eternally depressed parent must have been on a young, sensitive soul like John, and his mind was spinning to come up with something that might soothe the pain.

‘Did it ever get better? How is he nowadays?’ Brian asked, but John evaded his question.

‘It went on like that for years,’ John picked up the story again, ‘and the older we got the more our parents left us to ourselves. They left me alone to look after Julie when I was six or so.’

Brian, his own question already forgotten, asked: ‘And how old was she then?’

‘A year, I think. She couldn’t walk yet at any rate,’ John shrugged.

‘That’s not a healthy environment to grow up in, John,’ Brian said as he looked up at his teary-eyed partner. ‘Not at all. It’s dangerous to leave a baby or a toddler or any young child under the supervision of a child who is only a few years older. If something goes wrong, how would you be supposed to deal with that? If a child falls or chokes or drinks something poisonous-’ Brian pointed out in a rant directed towards this obviously irresponsible behaviour of his boyfriend’s parents, when suddenly something hit him.

_It was dangerous to leave a child to mind another child. Something could go wrong._

_A child would have no idea how to handle a problem. An accident._

_The accident of Julie and John feeling responsible for it._

_Julie._

John needed no more than Brian’s sudden silence to understand that he was starting to add one and one together, and he covered his face in his hands as he burst out in helpless sobs before Brian could even ask him if his suspicions held true. Brian, in turn, did not need any more confirmation; he might not know what exactly had gone down on that fateful day, but it was all too clear to him now why John had expressed earlier that he felt that he was to blame for the accident of his sister.

Brian stretched out closer to John so he could properly throw both of his arms around him and hold him as close to his own body as he could. Being physically close to him was all he could do now that words could make no impression on a person so besides themselves that Brian doubted he could sense anything besides his own grief - the grief he had obviously bottled up for much too long. He was grateful that John was surprisingly accepting of the embrace he offered him, that he in fact clung to Brian like a vice; it was the only consolation Brian felt he could offer him now that his partner was crying his heart out. All there was for him to do was manoeuvre John’s head against his shoulder and cradle him closely against him while he himself gazed at the white tiled wall behind him aimlessly. It was besides Brian how anyone could leave a fourth grader to supervise a pre-schooler on his own, and to think that two adults had left two children in a situation that had led to life-long injury for the one and life-long trauma for the other, made Brian wish he could go back in time and revoke custody at the very _very_ least.

‘It’s my fault,’ John managed between heart-wrenching sobs, and Brian carefully patted him on the back. He had never had to console John before - never had had to console anyone before for that matter, and he hoped that the words that slipped from his lips would manage to help him, or at any rate not upset him even more. He wished so much he could help John, but what on earth was there to say that could give him any comfort after years of self-imprinted guilt?

‘It’s okay, John. It’s okay,’ Brian whispered, and it surprised him that John could actually hear him over the sound of his own crying.

‘It’s _not_ okay!’ John countered him. ‘Julie will- will never recover and it’s my fault!’

Brian’s initial reaction was to tell John that no, it was not his fault, he was not responsible for his sister when their parents had failed to provide for him, but attempts at talking the guilt out of his head had been fruitless earlier that day, and Brian doubted it would do much to convince John of his own innocence now. Perhaps it was a better idea to try and find out what had gone down in the family, and help John cope when he had a bit more background on the tragic event that was weighing John down.

‘It’s true then, I suppose?’ Brian asked softly, continuing to rub John’s back with his left hand. ‘Something happened to Julie while your parents left you to watch her?’ John nodded heavily against his shoulder; the fabric clothing it turned damp with tearstains. Brian sighed deeply in compassion for his boyfriend, who was overcome with a new wave of tears when he added the little information John had told him earlier that day: ‘Something that led to a lack of oxygen, right? Which resulted in brain damage?’

‘She nearly _drowned_ ,’ John wept against his shoulder. ‘She was- and I- we were playing outside in- in the garden when she… the ditch,’ John hiccupped incoherently, leaving Brian stuck between telling him to take it easy and give himself a second, or leaving the decision of what to do to John himself now that the words seemed to pour out of him for what must have been - to Brian at any rate - the first time ever.

‘She fell into the ditch behind your house?’ Brian asked softly when John seemed too overcome to continue the sentence. ‘And she ended up underwater?’ John’s nodding coincided with a fit of coughing and tears, and Brian reached out to pick up and rip off a piece of toilet paper to brush away some of the tears on John’s cheeks while at the same time trying not to distract his partner from the things he was trying to tell him.

‘She couldn’t swim, an- and neither could I,’ John sobbed. ‘When she fell I didn’t- I didn’t comprehend it at first so I just… just stood there. Only when I saw her… her arms just sort of flailing above the water and heard her scream I realised we needed… needed _help_ ,’ John choked out the last word. Brian nodded in comprehension, not sure if John could see it through tearstained eyelashes but hoping John understood that he was there to listen to him. ‘And I don’t know how be-because everything is a blur but I somehow fetched a neighbour, the guy next door, and I cried and cried- and I begged him to come and help and he did, he jumped in and- and fetched Julie from the water.’

‘That was very good of you, honey. To get help for Julie,’ Brian said in an attempt to show John that he had done the right thing by having acted as he did, but John dismissed his statement with a violent shake of the head.

‘It was _not_. I should have been fast-faster, or jumped into the water myself, or- or…’

‘But you were in shock, John. You were a child, left to your own devices with a younger sibling, and you couldn’t swim. What should you have done?’ Brian asked softly. It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but John however seemed to have an answer ready.

‘I should have been faster,’ John sobbed. ‘If I-I’d been faster Julie would be okay.’

Brian felt his heart break at this reproach John was using to beat himself up with, and his mind spun to find the most sensitive thing to say to convince John that it had not been his fault in any shape or way. ‘No, John. You can’t think like that. If it hadn’t been for you, Julie would not have been here anymore today.’

‘If it hadn’t been for me she would have been better off,’ John sniffed. ‘I ruined her _life_.’

‘You did _not_ ,’ Brian said sharply, which only seemed to draw more tears from his companion. ‘If anything you saved her. Imagine if she had been out there in the garden all alone, who would have been there to call in help for her?’

‘With- without me she wouldn’t have been in the garden in the first place,’ John argued. ‘I took her there.’

‘Without you she would have been a five-year-old trotting in and around the house without anyone to watch her at all,’ Brian corrected him, having gotten the notion by now that parental supervision had been far away at the moment of the accident, given that John had had to reach out to a neighbour to save his sister from the life-threatening position she’d ended up with instead of to their own parents. Speaking of whom… ‘Where were your parents when this all happened?’

A shaky shrug of John’s shoulders followed. ‘I don’t know. Dad was a-at work and my mother- I called her but she didn’t react. Only when the ambulance showed up and searched for her did she emerge from her room or the bathroom or- or wherever she’d locked herself up for the day.’

Brian felt a hint of rage surging through his body - the _audacity_ of a mother of two to lock herself away from her young children and be out of reach in the case of an emergency, and only to show her face when paramedics dragged her out of her room to tell her of the tragedy that had unfolded under her eyes. Because that was what had happened - she had consciously looked away and left her children to venture for themselves. Brian could never imagine his mother, or any parent in the world to leave their offspring in such a compromised situation, and he had to retain himself from saying things about her that might upset John even more.

‘I presume she was held accountable for her negligence?’ he instead asked coolly, and didn’t know whether he should still be angry or merely disappointed at yet another misfortune in John’s youth.

‘She wasn’t. No one suspected her of- of neglecting us, because she was in hysterics when she learned what had happened. She was screaming and- and crying and begged the medics to save Julie, and begged to hold her. Five years too late,’ John added, shook his head to himself, and silent sobs overtook his body again. Brian reacted to the sense inside him telling him to hold John, but he had to remind himself not to hold him too tight and squeeze him in a manner that could be considered painful. The truth was, he felt like hurting someone or something. All the pain and frustration he felt on behalf of John’s dreadful background story made him want to scream and punch at a wall, and things apparently had not reached their climax as of yet.

‘Julie was rushed to the hospital, and she- well, she survived, but with the duration of time she’d gone without oxygen… doctors said it was a miracle she survived in the first place. All she would be able to do and- and relearn afterwards would just be added benefit.’

‘That must have been terrible to hear,’ Brian whispered.

‘It was. I remember her lying in that… that hospital bed, white as a sheet and attached to all these tubes and machines and- and somehow the worst was that my mum- she cried so much and was by her the entire time. It was as if she cared about us suddenly. About Julie. Because me…’ John hung his head just a little more than before. ‘If she didn’t hate me already, she certainly did now.’

Brian had known all along that they’d get to this topic - ever since John had dropped hints John earlier that afternoon about his parents blaming him for the accident of his sister - but that did not ease the pain of actually hearing him put it in context even a little. If anything, it seemed to make it worse - to hear that John was blamed for his sister’s accident when his mother had consciously left her two children on their own and when he had been the one to make sure Julie had been fetched from the water seemed so unfair to Brian, so fucking _unfair_.

‘She blamed you, then?’ Brian asked through gritted teeth. But instead of answering him directly, John let out a huff that seemed to be a combination of minutes of crying and a foreshadowing of the nearly unbelievable memory he was about to share.

‘I still remember the first time she caught me alone,’ John said. ‘It was in the hospital hallway, and she- it was visiting hour, and my aunt had brought me to see Julie when she was doing- well, she was conscious at any rate. My mother- when the nurses and my aunt were out of the room and Julie was sleeping, she said… we wouldn’t be sitting there if it hadn’t be for me. And you might take that as, ‘without you she would be dead’, but she looked at me with this… _contempt_ in her eyes. I’ve never seen anyone look at anyone with so much hate and… and _disgust_ ,’ John swallowed painfully. ‘She didn’t have to say anything anymore, because I knew- knew right then she’d hate me for the rest of her life.’

‘She had no right, John,’ Brian whispered through a throat that had grown to feel as if it had been made out of charcoal. ‘No right to ever blame you for any of the mistakes she made. Because all that happened on that day of your sister’s accident could have been prevented if she and our father had taken their parental responsibility. None of this is on you, John. Please, believe me,’ Brian silently begged his partner, who would not meet his eyes as tears continued to spill from them.

‘It’s what Leonard’s tried to tell me, and Nolan, and my aunt and- and some others but I- I’ll never forget how my mother looked at me that day. How she just… ignored me from that day, even more than she’d done before. She didn’t even have to say that she blamed me for how her life had turned out, and yet she did,’ John said. Then, with eyes closed: ‘Every single day she’d tell me or remind me of how I’d… I’d ruined Julie’s life, her life, caused my father’s depression, and- that she wished it had been me.’

Brian took in a deep breath, once again feeling the urge to punch a wall in the absence of the figure he’d really like to familiarise with the power of his curled-up first. He had never heard of such a pathetic excuse for a parental figure as John’s mother, and his father did not seem much better in his total mental absence either. He was starting to understand why John had not believed him when he had told him his parents loved him during their heart-to-heart at the gym that afternoon. Not a single child would feel welcome in an environment where a mother blamed them for her own shortcomings, and where a father existed only as an entity living in his own headspace.

‘I can’t believe she would do such things, John. To her own _child_ ,’ Brian choked out.

‘She didn’t see me as her child anymore,’ John simply shrugged.

‘And your father? Where was he in the middle of all of this… this mess?’ Brian asked. John’s sorrowful eyes met his for a moment, as if this was an unexpected - or at any rate undesired question. He could see his partner swallow painfully, trembling hands fidgeting with the hem of his shirt - and just when Brian wanted to open his mouth to ask if the topic of his father was one he should stay clear of, John answered him at last.

‘He wasn’t there anymore. He gave up,’ John eventually replied somewhat allusively.

‘Gave up on what?’ Brian whispered, eyes on those of the one who could not look at him in his current state of emotional instability.

‘On his life. He- he decided to leave a few months later.’

‘How? He left his job? Your family?’ Brian asked, but John hanging his head to avoid his prying eyes was more than he needed to realise that it was worse than that. Somehow what John’s father had done was worse than leaving the family; he must have left John’s life for good-

_He left. For good. Irrevocably. Not to ever come back._

‘ _No_ ,’ Brian whispered, hardly audible enough for John to hear. ‘Don’t tell me- no, John, _no_.’

He realised he must be sounding like he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but in all honesty, that was what he felt he was going to go through if it would turn out that John had been pulled through yet more family drama than he had told him of so far. John’s quivering bottom lip, however, was all he needed to see to have the truth hit home, and Brian had to fight hard to oppress the tendency to _scream_. Everything John had ever told him, _hadn’t_ told him, hinted at, it all fell into place now, and it all hit him like a brick. John could not write letters to his family because his family members were either mentally inaccessible, dead, or plainly evil - and Brian did not know which one of the three would be worse to deal with. But hell, letters were not even remotely part of the problem. John could never return home to them, could never build up a family bond, could never even feel the slightest of positive emotion towards his family, the people he had grown up among, the people who were supposed to love and support and protect him no matter what happened. The very people of whom Brian was sure would never give up on him no matter how and where he ended up, had single-handedly broken the spirit of a young boy who was supposed to have a whole life ahead of him, but who instead now felt as if death was closing in on him every single day. His parents had ruined his childhood and adolescence, taken away the light from his eyes with their irresponsibility and carelessness and utter, utter selfishness.

‘He _did_ ,’ John choked out. ‘He just- he left for work one morning, and didn’t come back. All that returned of him was- was the suitcase he left on- on the station before he jumped.’

For some reason, hearing the word ‘jumped’ somehow seemed to hit home harder to Brian than having John plainly tell him his father committed suicide. The mere thought of his father becoming increasingly more depressed over time and one day not returning from work anymore seemed unimaginable to Brian, and he could not even begin to think of what an effect this must have had on primary school aged John. It was sickening, nauseous, too much to even think about John having gone through so much misfortunes in his life, which, as a matter of speaking, had barely even begun.

‘Fuck, _John_ -’ Brian choked out as the only response he could come up with for the time being, and he threw his arms around his boyfriend. This time John didn’t resist against Brian touching him - in fact, he allowed himself to be enveloped by Brian’s arms and cried his heart out against his chest.

Brian felt paralysed in his position, and found himself being unable to move or speak or do anything other than continue the slight rocking motions with which he tried to comfort the boy in his arms. He had never seen John cry like this - had never seen John cry at all, mind you - so to have him break down in his presence was not something he had any familiarity with. He had never been particularly good with consoling people, usually found himself unable to know anything more than patting someone’s back, but for the time being it seemed like this was all that was required of him anyway. John was so caught up in helpless sobs and coughs and tears that Brian doubted he would be able to hear any words of consolation he might come up with. Even though this gave Brian a bit of time to think of what to say and how to comfort John, this hardly made him feel any more at ease; and how could he, when his partner had just laid bare his miserable childhood before him? How could he feel any other emotion apart from pain now that John was crying his eyes out for situations Brian couldn’t change a single thing about?

‘I’m so… so s- _sorry_ ,’ John choked out between sobs, and Brian shook his head.

‘Don’t be. Just- don’t worry about anything now, okay? Just… let yourself go,’ Brian managed, tightening his arms around John’s by now shaking upper body. He felt cold and fragile against him now, which was a huge difference compared to waking up next to John’s warm figure early in the morning. Brian could not believe that it had been less than twelve hours ago since they’d done just that - waking up in the same bed and getting to enjoy the start of the day together. Less than twelve hours ago he had felt that he was finally starting to get his life back together, that he was doing better, that _John_ was doing better - only to have all of his hopes come crashing down by the discovery of John’s guilt towards his sister’s accident, John’s negative reaction to being allowed to leave Queen Mary’s, and now, worse than all he had gone through at the institute so far, hearing John pour out his heart and let him in on what had to be the saddest childhood Brian had ever heard. A childhood that apparently could still get worse, it turned out when John, after having recovered his breath and speech properly again, went on to tell him.

Sitting in the cramped toilet stall with Brian crouching in front of him, dabbing a crumpled piece of toilet paper that functioned as a tissue at his red eyes, John proceeded to tell his tale where he’d left off. From the funeral of his father that had gone by like a bad, surreal dream, and the ever-growing detest his mother felt for him. How he had eventually been taken into the house of his aunt and uncle when his family had noticed the tension in their household, but how this had been done out of obligation rather than from a feeling for their nephew or from the generosity of their hearts. He had never been treated the same as their own children, and always felt like he was an intrusion of their family life. When feeling down or making trouble, he’d always been told that he should feel grateful that he’d been taken in by his aunt and uncle, for they could also send him back to his mother - which to John had been a worse prospect than being shipped off to a deserted island. As she lived close by, and his aunt and his mother kept in touch, John sometimes had the pleasure (or displeasure, rather) of seeing her, and it seemed as if she looked at him with renewed detestation those few times a year they would cross ways.

The story continued, with John telling Brian that he had sunken lower and lower in his teenage years, fallen into a depression that had long gone unnoticed due to the fact that no one paid particular attention to him. When at age sixteen he’d run away from the family provided foster home, no one had even looked for him; he had returned after two weeks of lodging with friends and classmates here and there to find his aunt letting him into the house rather begrudgingly, and his uncle sighing loudly enough to make it clear to John that they would have preferred for him to leave them forever. And so would he, but he had nowhere to go - with no parents either alive or taking responsibility for him, and no other family in the area to go to. Where was he to go, a depressed, socially reclusive sixteen-year-old from the suburbs of Leicester, who according to the law was still under the care and responsibility of his mother? He did all he could do - which was in the eyes of the world becoming more reclusive, more private, more antisocial, while for him this meant becoming less vulnerable. Less sensitive for what people around him might think about him or say or do to him.

This was a quality that came in handy for his mental survival; with his aunt eternally telling him how grateful he should be that they had taken him in, and an uncle who shouted at him on a daily basis about how he was getting nowhere in life and how he should stop being pathetic, it was important to be able to let it all slide past him. Especially his uncle was vexing to deal with; he’d yell and stomp his foot and literally drag him out of his room when he’d took refuge to it, telling him to go out, get a job, get a girlfriend, do whatever normal teenagers were supposed to do. The only thing was that Joh did not feel like a normal teenager, and that his state of mind would not allow him to be one either. The crushing guilt of the accident of his sister, the death of his father, the hate he knew his mother and family felt for him, the futility of his life in the grand scheme of things - it felt as if the weight of the entire universe was crushing down on him at all times, rendering him incapable of doing anything else besides hiding in his room and lying in bed for hours on end. It did not matter what his cousins and uncle said; he felt both physically and mentally unable to leave his room. The world around him was a black pit, a black pit of quicksand, and he was sinking faster and faster.

His uncle had eventually sent him to the doctor, hoping that he could tell John that there was nothing wrong with him apart from a lack of willpower, and that he should pull himself together. It had therefore been rather a setback for him when the man had referred John to a psychiatrist, who in turn concluded that John suffered from a severe depression and an antisocial personality disorder. His uncle taunted him for being weak enough to fall victim to depression, but his aunt has a different approach to John’s diagnosis. Seeing it as a way to get rid of him, his aunt would feed into John’s guilt and negative thoughts, until he eventually fell deeply enough to start self-harming and show erratic, harmful behaviour - more violent towards himself than towards anyone else, granted, but it was enough to convince his psychiatrist that he needed to be watched more closely.

Sessions increased from once every two week to thrice a week, and during the summer break following his unexpected graduation from high school, he was sent for day care at a place where ‘troubled adults’ could be monitored and counselled. The place, however, had catered towards drug addicts and youth criminals more than socially reclusive and severely depressed individuals like John. He’d fallen deeper and deeper, and after a breakdown at his aunt’s home where he’d smashed a vase into the wall and swore he’d never go back to the place, his aunt had called the police. She had him removed from her house for destructive and violent behaviour, and after a night in the cell where his desperation had been severe enough to beat his own fist to a pulp against the cell door, he’d been sent for crisis relief at the psychiatry ward at the local hospital. Three more days of antisociality, depression, and self-harm here had sealed his fate, and he had been shipped off to Queen Mary’s on the order of his psychiatrist. The rest of the story was history.

It was painful for Brian to listen to the story - to hear of all of the grief and hurt and harm John had been made to put up with all throughout his youth and adolescence. To see John sob and cry and cover his face between the sentences and sometimes even mere word, when this was all he could utter at the time, made Brian feel like someone had ripped his heart out of his chest and was currently slowly tearing it into little pieces in front of him, like a bored pubgoer might do with a spare paper napkin.

In the end, however, it was not even the entire story that made Brian lose the composure he had worked on so hard to keep together for the sake of his partner. It was when John confronted him with how his previous enthusiasm about the ground-breaking news that he was allowed to leave Queen Mary’s had hurt him that made Brian tear up himself.

‘Do you understand me now, why I- I don’t want to go home? It’s because I don’t _have_ a place to call home,’ John sobbed with renewed vigour, removing his hands from his face to look at Brian with tear-stained eyes that held more sorrows than he could express. ‘You ha-have your parents and friends and whoever more out there. Who do I have? My dad’s grave at the cemetery? Not even a-a grave but a _memorial_. An aunt who kick-kicked me out? A mother who hates me, or a sister- a sister who doesn’t even recognise me anymore? What’s _my_ home to go to?’ John asked, wiping away the tears from his face with a rough gesture of the back of his hand. Brian, however, let the tears that welled up run free. He had no desire to hide them, nor could he do so if he had wanted to. He was frozen, too frozen by shock and grief and sorrow and a range of emotions he could not label in the whirlwind of his mind for the time being.

‘I understand- fuck, I understand, and I wish I’d done so sooner,’ Brian whispered, caressing the crown of John’s hair when his partner hung his head. ‘I’m so sorry, Deaky- I should have understood you sooner. You not wanting to talk about your family, and the situation with your sister…’ Brian paused for a second to wipe a tear from his cheek. It all made so much sense now; John’s eternal quietness about his background, his unwillingness to write letters with anyone, his not receiving visitors from outside of Queen Mary’s, his reticence to attaching himself to people too quickly, or even at all. The pieces of the puzzle had all fallen into place by John finally opening up about the things he’d gone through, and Brian had never wanted to be more able to trade places with someone else and be able to absorb all of their pain and grief, to bear it for them just so that they would not have to carry it with them all the time. He would do anything to make John feel better and to put him in a better position, but what could he do? What was there to do for him other than to hold him and to caress him and to tell him he would be there for him?

‘It’s not your fault,’ John squeaked. ‘You couldn’t know- all of this.’

‘No, but I should have known better,’ Brian reproached himself. ‘With you not… receiving letters or phone calls or visitors, and not- not wanting to talk about your life before Queen Mary’s… I should have been able to tell.’

‘It’s not your fault. I should- should have let you in earlier,’ John sniffed.

‘And I should have been more sensible and not press on when you were clearly not happy by the news. I was just- so relieved to hear that you’d be allowed to leave, and wouldn’t have to go to a long-stay clinic,’ Brian admitted. ‘I figured that leaving Queen Mary’s would be a good thing, since no one really wants to be here unless… unless the alternative is worse,’ Brian said softly, as not to upset John again. His partner had just recovered from his fit of crying, and the last thing Brian wanted to do was sent him back to this deplorable state by reminding him too vividly of the choice that would turn John away from the only place he’d known for almost two years.

A belated sob left John’s throat, and he looked at Brian with miserable eyes. ‘Any alternative is worse when it’s not with you,’ he said in the smallest voice - a voice that sent tears back to Brian’s eyes.

‘Oh, honey…’ Brian said, enveloping John’s torso with his arms again just before his partner burst out in tears again. ‘It’ll be alright, okay? It’ll be alright.’

‘It won’t be,’ John sobbed. ‘They’re sending me away from you, and I can’t- I can’t be apart from you, Brian. I can’t deal with that.’

‘I know, I know, I know,’ Brian said, patting John’s back a little too forcefully, for the tapping resounded through his own chest. ‘But I’ll find a way, okay? I’ll find a way.’

‘How?’ John asked tearfully.

‘I don’t know,’ Brian admitted, but then corrected himself. ‘I don’t know yet, but I’ll find a way. I won’t let you go out there on your own, honey.’

‘Promise?’ John’s voice sounded more vulnerable than it had ever done before, and if Brian had had any doubt that he would be there for his boyfriend, it faded that exact moment. He would make sure John and he would not be separated even if it was the last thing he’d do.

‘Of course I promise.’

 

# # #

 

Three pairs of eyes were locked together. Three pairs of eyes wide open, three mouths completely shut; something that did not happen often when two of those mouths belonged to Freddie and Roger. Any other evening they’d spend in their bedroom, one could have bet that noise of some sort would be erupting from the place at all times; either from Freddie trying to convince the others that ‘scrawk’ was the words describing the sound that crows made in an attempt to get his latest Scrabble creation accepted by the rest of the players, or by Brian heatedly explaining the necessity of the curvature of the earth while inwardly wondering whether Freddie and Roger were just playing tricks on him or if they really should be launched back into pre-modern Europe. Today, however, the dorm room was sound- and motionless apart from the almost invisible movement of a hand smoothing over crumpled duvet covers.

‘Well?’

The monosyllable was whispered so softly that the receiver of it could hardly make out which one of his roommates had been the source of it. Carefully, so very carefully, Brian bent closer to John’s face - and, upon feeling soft but regular breathing and meeting a pair of closed eyes, he allowed himself to sigh in relief.

‘I think he’s sleeping,’ Brian whispered.

‘Thank _God_ ,’ Freddie said, letting himself fall backwards on the mattress he was sitting on. It seemed a bit of an excessive reaction, but after having spent more than an hour trying to get John to settle in bed, lie down, stop crying, and go to sleep, it really felt like a victory to see that they’d finally succeeded.

‘Of course he is. I told you this stuff works miracles.’ Roger’s face sported a cheeky grin as he held up a half empty strip of pills. Brian threw him a grimace, and Freddie did not seem too pleased either - but Roger might be having a point. Twenty minutes into Brian lying next to John and Freddie crouching in front of him trying to convince him that all would be well and that he should get some rest, Roger had put the tissues and puts of water aside and told them he was going to fix something for John. He’d been gone for about ten to fifteen minutes and returned with notably dishevelled hair and a small strip of unidentifiable pills which had the words _Valium Diazepam 15 mg_ printed on the push-through tin foil. Roger had been unwilling to answer Freddie’s questions of where he’d been and how he’d acquired those pills that were either description medicines for some other patient or which had been smuggled into Queen Mary’s illegally, but he had guaranteed that they’d be safe and that it would help John calm down.

After a short but intense discussion concerning whether these drugs were supposed to reduce insomnia or anxiety, and whether it would be right to give them to John exactly now that he was so vulnerable, another helpless fit of crying, coughing, and sobbing had pushed Brian into giving it a try. He’d taken up a pill with shaking hands, broken it into pieces, and given them to John together with a glass of water to wash them down. It had been easier than expected; John, who by then had been crying for longer than anyone wished to recall, had been too worn-down to protest, and swallowed the bits between helpless coughs. Whether it was the result of the substances of the medicines, a placebo effect, or the fact that John had already worn himself down by an hour of crying, was something Brian guessed they would never know - but the fact of the matter was that it had been no more than a few minutes after John had been given those drugs that his crying turned into sobbing, which in turn morphed into soft sniffing. With the help of some comforting words from Roger, back rubs from Freddie, and the mere presence of Brian sitting next to him, John had eventually drifted off. At the moment, apart from the occasional stray sob that escaped him still, the youngest roommate was sound- and motionless and fast asleep, much to the comfort of the remaining three.

‘Not sure if it’s that or just the fact that he was dead tired, but I’m just thankful that he’s asleep.’

‘You’re allowed to give me some credit for once, May,’ Roger remarked, but his tone was not unkind.

‘You’re not getting any credits before you confess where you got those pills, Rog,’ Freddie said before Brian could answer. ‘If you went down on a guard again, I am not to be held responsible for the things I might say or do.’ It struck Brian that this sentence should not sound threatening at all, coming from a man standing 5’9’’ tall and impossibly weighing more than 95 pounds, but for some reason, it did.

‘I didn’t!’ Roger said in a voice that was loud enough to make Brian put his finger across his lips to remind him to be quiet. For this reason, or perhaps out of shame and fear for Freddie’s reaction, Roger added much softer: ‘Not a guard, at any rate.’

Freddie inhaled sharply. ‘Roger Meddows _fucking_ Taylor-’

‘Before you get angry,’ Roger said, holding up a hand. ‘I didn’t do it for myself, or because I wanted to taste some other guy’s dick, if that’s what you think - I did it for John. This was the only guy I know of who trades out Valium for blowjobs, compared to… doing other things. This was easiest and quickest, and we needed something to help John settle. I’m not proud of it, okay? But I couldn’t stand seeing John cry anymore. It was the only thing I felt I could do.’

Roger’s account, although not very clear or detailed, contained a quality of heart-feltness that neither of his roommates could deny. Brian was moved by the somewhat extraordinary lengths Roger was apparently willing to go to to help a friend, and although he could not speak on behalf of Roger’s partner, he had a feeling that even Freddie could not stay mad at him for too long.

‘It’s okay,’ Freddie eventually sighed. ‘I mean, I’m not happy about it, but…’

‘Neither am I. But this isn’t about us,’ Roger reminded him. ‘It’s about him, and about us working together to help him.’ A nod of his head into John’s direction followed, and Freddie, after having taken an extensive period of time to look at John’s sleeping frame, eventually agreed.

‘We need to come up with a plan to help him, darlings,’ Freddie concluded. ‘And since we promised him something as impossible as not letting him go out there on his own, we better get to it straight away.’ Freddie’s voice contained a dryness that wasn’t typical for the usually upbeat and optimistic man, but which Brian could understand well in the current situation. He had promised John time and time again, both in the bathroom stall they’d spent the remainder of the afternoon and in the bedroom they’d retreated to when John eventually had let him usher away during dinner to secure they wouldn’t meet anyone in the hallway, that he would not let him go out of Queen Mary’s alone. Freddie and Roger, upon returning from the canteen and learning the reason behind John sobbing out his heart against Brian’s chest, had done the same; the only problem now was that they had no idea how to go about doing this. The admission, stay, and dismission of any patient at Queen Mary’s lay completely in the hands of the staff, so they had quite a task before them if they wanted to make true on their promise.

‘Okay, let’s see. What are our options?’ Brian asked, for the first time in forever letting his eyes slip away from John to share a glance with his friends.

Freddie was the one to answer his question after a few seconds of silence. ‘As far as I can see, we either have to get ourselves released from this place with him now, or we have to make sure he can stay until we’ll be let go of as well. Both of which are rather problematic.’

‘How so?’ Roger inquired.

‘Let’s go with having John stay here longer. How will we convince staff of letting him stay when they are apparently so determined he’s ready to be let go of?’

‘He could go back to his old ways,’ Roger said. ‘Locking himself away, talking to nobody, being antisocial, you know...’ His eyes met Brian’s shortly as to make sure he hadn’t offended Brian by talking of the symptoms of John’s disorder in such a light fashion, but Brian took no offence against it. He knew exactly what Roger was getting at, but he had a feeling that this wouldn’t lead anywhere.

‘The problem is that staff probably won’t notice in the midst of all the fighting and smuggling and other problems going on at the moment,’ Brian therefore said.

‘Maybe he could join that? If he gets himself in trouble for fighting or destruction of property or unacceptable behaviour or whatever, they should pick up on that,’ Roger argued.

‘John picking a fight. I’d like to see that,’ Freddie snorted. ‘But this is merely fighting one problem with a new one. Let’s say it works, and Deaky will be detained for longer. He’s already close to his two years’ mark. If he behaves poorly and Leonard or Jasper or whoever makes the decisions around him decide that he isn’t ready to go back to society again, he’ll be sent to a long stay clinic. And God knows when or if he’ll ever be released from that.’

‘That’s not an option,’ Brian, who turned queasy at the mere idea of John being shipped off to a permanent mental hospital, interfered sharply. ‘I’m afraid he’ll have to leave, or they’ll lock him up for no one knows how long. Unless - can’t we convince staff to let him stay longer, until at least one of us will be allowed to leave with him?’ he pondered out loud.

‘Two years is already a long time, Brian,’ Freddie reminded him. ‘Queen Mary’s rarely keeps people for longer than eighteen months, so John’s time here is already pushing it. They’re not built for long-term help.’

‘They’re not built for help of any kind,’ Brian grumbled, eyes fixated on John again. As he gently tucked John’s long hair behind his ear, he saw that his boyfriend’s ruddy cheeks had finally dried of tears, but the red rims continued to show he had been crying previously. Especially compared to the starch white linen (not starch white, perhaps - but they were surprisingly white for anything found inside of Queen Mary’s) that he was lying on, John’s face showed all too many signs of the emotional distress he had gone through earlier. Brian wished he could do something for him, _really_ do something for him instead of sitting here and caressing his back while he slept.

‘And there’s a waiting list,’ Freddie rattled on. ‘John has to leave so that new people can be taken in. That’s how they work here.’

‘Okay, so I think making John stay longer is out of question,’ said Brian, who thoroughly understood that making John stay longer in whatever fashion or for whatever reason was not going to be a good idea. ‘We’ll have to go with him, then, or at least one of us.’

‘I fear that he only really would want to go with you,’ Roger commented. Brian blushed a little, even though he knew he shouldn’t. It was all too natural that John should want his own partner to go with them rather than one of his friends - but Brian realised all too well that it wasn’t a question of whom John would want to go with him, but of whom possibly could leave Queen Mary’s quickly after - or preferably simultaneously - with him.

‘But I’ve been here shorter than any of us. There’s no way they’ve even considered letting me go already,’ Brian said. ‘Besides, I’ve been told I’m quite an interesting experiment with my borderline and all. Not sure they’d want to let go of me before at least fifteen people have written theses, dissertations, and promotions on my case.’

‘Well, there’s no chance of me being released anywhere soon either,’ Roger reflected. ‘They just caught me with a needle up my elbow the other day.’

‘Do I even need to say it? I’ve just been downgraded to daily meetings with my dietician,’ Freddie said before anyone could even comment whether they wanted to hear the reason why his dismissal would be impossible for the time being spoken out loud.

‘Okay, so none of us have a decent hope of being dismissed anywhere soon,’ Brian sighed - it was common knowledge, but hearing them speak out loud that it was in impossibility somehow hurt more than he expected it to do. ‘What more can we do?’

‘We could elope,’ Freddie suggested.

‘Elope?’ Brian asked.

‘Yeah, you know. Run away.’

Roger snickered. ‘Like Bennet and Wickham.’

Freddie frowned. ‘Like who?’

‘Like Lydia Bennett and George Wickham. Elizabeth’s younger sister and her suitor. From Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen? The canon of English literature?’ Roger tried all he could come up with to make Freddie understand his reference, but Freddie just stared at his boyfriend rather blankly until he came up with a perfectly sassy clapback.

‘I didn’t know you could read.’

Roger rolled his eyes. ‘Funny, Bulsara. What do you think I do while you’re at the gym burning non-existent fat?’

‘I don’t know, jerking off some greasy old guard for a gram of heroin?’ Freddie suggested good-naturedly, and Roger stuck out his tongue at him.

Making no reply to Freddie’s teasing comment, Roger said: ‘Anyway, you want us to run away from a heavily secured mental hospital in the middle of nowhere, and think that no one would either go look for us, or turn us back in?’

‘Heavily secured my ass,’ Freddie said. ‘The average girl scout club meeting is better guarded than Queen Mary’s. With all those recent financial cuts, I don’t think there’s more than one or two nightguards anymore after eleven.’

‘There’s still a thing called doors and alarms, mind you. We can’t even leave this wing at night.’

‘We can,’ Brian said. When two pairs of eyes looked at him sceptically, he explained: ‘John has a way. He knows how to dismantle the emergency door that leads downstairs.’

‘And why am I only finding out about that now?’ Roger asked.

‘Because you’re trouble enough during the daytime, love. Give those two poor nightguards a break.’

‘Speak for yourself! At least I didn’t try and hide in the gym after dinner so I could work out overnight, and had to be escorted back by what, three staff members?’ Roger recalled.

‘He did what now?’ Brian asked.

‘Something silly that happened before you got here, darling. Nothing to worry about,’ Freddie said. Brian, although slightly worried by the tale of this incident, decided to put it aside for the time being. Finding a way to let John leave Queen Mary’s without launching him into a possible new episode of depression was more important than Freddie’s sport-related escapades at the moment - something Roger seemed to think, too.

‘Either way, so we can open the emergency exit from this wing, which puts us downstairs. We’d still somehow have to make our outside of the building, then over the fences, and find a place to stay here in the middle of absolutely nowhere,’ Roger said. ‘What’s more, the second anyone around the area sees these uniform shirts, they’ll call the cops on us.’

‘Guess we’ll have to go shirtless then,’ Freddie said with a rare teeth-baring grin, but Brian could tell that he was starting to realise that it escaping Queen Mary’s, regardless of the amount of security guards and working alarms around the place, might be easier said than done.

‘Has anyone ever walked away from this place? Like, successfully?’ Brian said, remembering the instance John had told him of someone who’d done a poor attempt trying to climb the barbed wire-clad fences around the garden, and who had to be cut out of it with iron scissors by staff members. Not exactly a successful predecessor to look up to or to lead them by example.

Roger seemed to reflect for a moment. ‘Not while I’ve been here’.

‘I also don’t recall. But we could be the first ones?’ Freddie tried, even though it was audible in his voice that he didn’t have much faith in the plan himself. ‘Probably not,’ he corrected himself when he was met with nothing but sceptic glances.

‘Well, what is there to do, then?’ said Roger, a touch of defeat in his tone. Brian chewed on the inside of his left cheek, his hand continuing to smooth over John’s back. He realised all too well that they were running out of ideas, and could have thought of this himself without having Roger sum up all the impossibilities they were facing. ‘We can’t reasonably escape and expect that to go down well, and not either get caught halfway through the act or be sent back when we get out. John can’t stay longer, or he’ll be sent to a long-stay clinic, and none of us have any chances of our psychiatrists or mentors or whoever is in charge of us bringing up the possibility of us being allowed to leave.’

And that was when someone in Brian’s head suddenly clicked.

‘ _They_ might not bring it up, but _we_ can,’ Brian said, more to himself than to anyone else who might be listening to him. He was an idiot for not having thought of this earlier when the answer had been out there all along, a total idiot. He couldn’t believe he had gone through hours of sitting by John’s side and trying to soothe him, tell him he’d find a way so he wouldn’t be thrown out of Queen Mary’s without any form of help, tell him he wouldn’t leave him alone, when one simple sentence could have taken so many of his fears away.

‘What do you mean? We bring up what?’ Roger asked. Freddie looked at him with an equally confused look on his face, which made Brian wonder if his friends had ever heard of the mere name of the scheme he had in mind. When John had first told him about it, outside on the swings on the same day they’d vowed not to cut anymore, he had also disclosed that it was a trick hardly anyone at Queen Mary’s knew about. Unfortunately for his friends, Brian wasn’t much in the mood for explaining it now. There was time enough for explanation later; what he needed to do now was finding Nolan, Jasper, Sarah, anyone who was around at the present moment to listen to the plan he had in mind.

‘That I’m leaving,’ Brian said - or blurted, more like - out. This statement turned the looks of confusion of his friends even more puzzled, but he took little offence against this. Giving John’s hair one more loving stroke, he slipped off the bed as carefully as possible in order not to wake his lover up, and then made a run for the door.

‘What are you- where are you going?’ Freddie asked, eyes wide with surprise.

‘To find Nolan or Jasper or whoever is around,’ Brian answered vaguely, hand already on the door handle but unable to pull it down and leave the room when Freddie continued to question him.

‘Why? What do you need him for?’ Freddie followed up, much to Brian’s frustration. He understood very well that his friend wanted to know what he had in mind, but he didn’t feel like explaining his plans now that carrying them out was his pain priority.

‘I’ll explain it all later. Look after John, will you? If he wakes up, tell him I’ll be right back. Don’t give him any more meds, though - just tell him I’m taking care of some things.’ With that, Brian opened the door and stepped over the threshold, making sure to leave before anyone could ask any more questions.

The hallway of their wing was empty; the staircase similarly so. Brian didn’t know exactly what time it was, but it must be well after eight o’clock, for dinner had been a long time ago. Looking through the window of the canteen, he saw that all the tables had been cleared out, the floors swept, and no one was present anymore. This struck him as odd for a moment, but he soon remembered the new regulation that told everyone to leave the canteen as soon as dinner was over. Staff had stated some vague reason about making it easier for the cleaning employees to clear up the canteen, but everybody knew it was just another disguised attempt to keep violence to a minimum. Too many incidents taking place in the canteen had been reported these last few weeks, mainly taking place in the evening, when the quiet patients lounged around in their rooms and the more rowdy ones gathered either in the activity room or the canteen. For Brian personally it did not matter whether the canteen was closed to the public after seven o’clock or not, but it sure did give an indication of how precarious the situation at Queen Mary’s had become.

Not something he had to worry about too much, though. All he had to concern himself with for the time being was finding one of the people who looked after him to ask for a request he was sure they did not get to hear every day. Skipping past the canteen, his first instinct was to go and find Sarah - who, being his primary psychiatrist, he assumed could be most useful for the goal he wished to attain. However, just as he raised his arm to knock on her door, he realised it was useless - Sarah’s working day was most likely to end somewhere around five in the afternoon, and there was no way she would still be in her office this late in the evening. The same probably went for Jasper, who, as a therapist, was also likely to work regular hours. The only one he could then probably appeal to would be Nolan, who, although not occupying a large role in his mental recovery process, was still his mentor. On top of that, Nolan was both one of the few nurses at the place ánd a notorious overtime worker, so Brian had hopes of being able to find him and tell him about his scheme.

Changing his direction, Brian now sprinted towards the hallway located at the other side of the canteen - a place where he had never really been before, but where he had been told staff rooms and offices were supposed to be. He vaguely remembered Nolan having told him just the other day about which room number was his and which people he shared it with, but in the midst of his chaotic mind Brian could not retrieve the information. Frustrated with himself for not remembering, he turned to the first door - which was labelled to be number eleven - and peered through the small glass peephole, only to find that it worked from the inside only. This was probably logical; it was more practical for the person inside the room to pear at their would-be visitors standing at their doorstep, than for the visitor to see who was inside the room. Luckily, when Brian took a step away from the door, he noticed a small panel at the right side of it. Four names were neatly carved into the metal plate, followed by a slidable piece of iron that either left the word ‘present’ or the word ‘absent’ visible. Brian recognised it from university, where the professors residing in each building had a similar (be it larger) present-absent boards to save students from endlessly wandering around in search of a teacher that was not even at university at that particular moment.

Feeling a bit encouraged, Brian started glancing over the names on the first board. Recognising merely that of Ian and David, two of the security guys, he moved on to the next door - one which displayed four names of which none really rung a bell for him. The same went for the next panel, where only the name of archivist Gracie resounded with him. It was funny, really, how after having permanently resided at the place for a handful of months Brian still had no idea who many of these people were. Sure, he might recognise them when he came across them, but he could not link their names to their faces - and he assumed that the other way around would be the same story.

Making his way through the names on the left side of the hallway, he came across some more familiar names - that of Freddie’s dietician, John’s psychiatrist, the receptionist, some more guards, and, painfully enough, that of Ariel. Even more painful was the fact that her name sign had never been checked out; Brian had picked up somewhere that she had been escorted out of the building after an ‘incident with a patient’ no one had so far been able to further specify, and had never returned since. Apparently none of her co-workers had taken the time or the effort or simply the dignity to put her name on absent.

By the time Brian had gone through all the names of the people on the left side of the hallway, which had brought him no further in his search for Nolan but which had granted him the interesting information of Queen Mary’s apparently employing a guy with the unfortunate name of Mo Lester, he was starting to get somewhat frustrated. With a touch of impatience he turned around to skip over the names on the opposite side of the hallway, which also did not get him anywhere until eventually his eyes fell on the name Derek. He remembered Nolan having told him that he shared a room with three other people, one of which was Roger’s and Freddie’s mentor Derek. Knowing he had finally arrived at the right place, Brian closed his eyes and mumbled something that might qualify as a prayer in the eyes of a religious person, hoping so badly to find Nolan still being here. Nolan was his last hope, and he was afraid he would lose his mind if he would have to wait until the day after or even longer for Nolan to return to work so he could pose his question.

Opening his eyes again, Brian cleared the sudden lump in his throat, and scanned his eyes over the name panel of room number six.

_Derek Johnston. Absent._

_Jasper Vee. Absent._

_Vic Altenburg. Absent._

_Nolan Ferrier. Present._

Present! A wave of relief and excitement washed over Brian when he drunk in that one little word that saved him from having to wait yet longer for a solution for his problem. In the heat of the moment he forgot all proper visiting etiquette, and, without knocking, he nearly slammed open the door to the room. Inside of it he found two men sitting at a small desk pushed against the left wall, who looked up from the stack of papers spread out before them. Against the other wall an opened closet displaying work uniforms was visible, right next to a creaky looking bunk bed that provided a sleeping place for employees working overnight, as Brian guessed might be Nolan’s fate tonight.

‘Brian!’ Nolan nearly jumped up from the chair he was sitting on, and the guy next to him - someone Brian thought he recognised as professor Imholz, one of Queen Mary’s few psychiatrists qualified to work with severe cases such as Drew and Clyde, followed his example in this. ‘What are you doing here so late? Are you alright?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m fine - all fine,’ Brian blurted out.

‘Are you sure? Your face is all red,’ Nolan pointed out, and Brian, instinctively bringing up a hand to his cheeks, felt indeed that they were rather warm from the tension he’d pulled himself through. He must be looking rather bewildered, running into his mentor’s room at full speed without knocking and with flushed cheeks, but he did not have time to explain that now either.

‘I’m fine, really. Look, Nolan, I need your help,’ Brian said, ready to get right down to it. ‘Will you arrange a meeting with an independent psychiatrist and let me call my parents?’

Nolan shared a short look with professor Imholz upon hearing this rather unexpected request, and then turned back to his patient. ‘What do you need that for all of a sudden?’

‘I’m applying for a reassessment,’ Brian answered with a confidence he had not felt in a long time. ‘I need to- no, I’m _going_ to get out of this place.’

 

 

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed! Please keep in mind that like 99% of this is fiction, and that I made John's background story up myself; his father did indeed die when John was ten and he does have a sister, but that's about all that's factually correct here. Please leave comments and/or feedback if you have them - I love reading and replying to them (even though I'm slow at times hsdfhsfhshf). Love you all!


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